Tuesday, August 27, 2013

VMWare Player and 3D HW support on Linux

There are issues with HW acceleration in VMWare player on linux. Despite Player has 3d support option it doesn't work on most of Linux machines. Problem is related to TF2-S3TC Texture Support in DRI and is described in details here. So if in your country you are allowed to use this extension then you need to enable it in you system. You can do it manually but e.g. in Ubuntu you can install driconf application and change configuration from Gui:

sudo apt-get install driconf

And change change "Enable S3TC texture compression..." in "Image Quality" tab like on following image:

Some of host 3d drivers are blacklisted in VMWare. To ignore this limit just add:

mks.gl.allowBlacklistedDrivers = "TRUE"

To your *.vmx file.

Now you should be able to run your VM guest OS with HW 3d support on Linux host.