How To Install VirtualGL on CentOS 7
Introduction
In this tutorial we learn how to install VirtualGL on CentOS 7.
What is VirtualGL
VirtualGL is a toolkit that allows most Unix/Linux OpenGL applications to be remotely displayed with hardware 3D acceleration to thin clients, regardless of whether the clients have 3D capabilities, and regardless of the size of the 3D data being rendered or the speed of the network. Using the vglrun script, the VirtualGL “faker” is loaded into an OpenGL application at run time. The faker then intercepts a handful of GLX calls, which it reroutes to the server’s X display (the “3D X Server”, which presumably has a 3D accelerator attached.) The GLX commands are also dynamically modified such that all rendering is redirected into a Pbuffer instead of a window. As each frame is rendered by the application, the faker reads back the pixels from the 3D accelerator and sends them to the “2D X Server” for compositing into the appropriate X Window. VirtualGL can be used to give hardware-accelerated 3D capabilities to VNC or other X proxies that either lack OpenGL support or provide it through software rendering. In a LAN environment, VGL can also be used with its built-in high-performance image transport, which sends the rendered 3D images to a remote client (vglclient) for compositing on a remote X server. VirtualGL also supports image transport plugins, allowing the rendered 3D images to be sent or captured using other mechanisms. VirtualGL is based upon ideas presented in various academic papers on this topic, including “A Generic Solution for Hardware-Accelerated Remote Visualization” (Stegmaier, Magallon, Ertl 2002) and “A Framework for Interactive Hardware Accelerated Remote 3D-Visualization” (Engel, Sommer, Ertl 2000.)
We can use yum or dnf to install VirtualGL on CentOS 7. In this tutorial we discuss both methods but you only need to choose one of method to install VirtualGL.
Install VirtualGL on CentOS 7 Using yum
Update yum database with yum using the following command.
sudo yum makecache
After updating yum database, We can install VirtualGL using yum by running the following command:
sudo yum -y install VirtualGL
Install VirtualGL on CentOS 7 Using dnf
If you don’t have dnf installed you can install DNF on CentOS 7 first.
Update yum database with dnf using the following command.
sudo dnf makecache
After updating yum database, We can install VirtualGL using dnf by running the following command:
sudo dnf -y install VirtualGL
How To Uninstall VirtualGL on CentOS 7
To uninstall only the VirtualGL package we can use the following command:
sudo dnf remove VirtualGL
References
Summary
In this tutorial we learn how to install VirtualGL on CentOS 7 using yum and dnf.
