How to identify the graphics driver on a virtual machine

Running L3Harris software products such as ENVI, IDL or SARScape in a virtual machine/ cloud environment has been increasing in popularity.  It is important to make sure the virtual machine meets the same hardware requirements as a standard desktop or laptop.  In most cases, the method for installing and running in a VM environment is no different than a standard desktop or laptop.

However, it is not uncommon for virtual machines to lack a physical graphics card and will instead use default software libraries. Some tools in L3Harris software products require a dedicated graphics card to support OpenGL hardware rendering, such as the color visualization of displacement point vector files on a VM.

Our release notes state that full support requires a hardware graphics driver:

OpenGL hardware rendering is not fully supported on Linux VMs with the VMWare SVGA device driver. For full OpenGL hardware support on a VM, switch to using an nVidia driver.

 

To identify which driver is being used on a virtual machine, run this compound command in an IDL command line:

w = IDLgrWindow(Renderer=0) & w.GetDeviceInfo, All=all & print, all, /Implied

 

If the driver is VMWare SVGA, you will see properties such as this:

"NAME" : "SVGA3D; build: RELEASE; LLVM;"

"VENDOR" : "VMWare, Inc."

"VERSION" : "3.0 Mesa 17.2.3"  

 

If it is using an nVidia driver, it would look something like this:

    "NAME": "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M/PCIe/SSE2",

    "NUM_CPUS": 8,

    "SHADING_LANGUAGE_VERSION": "4.60 NVIDIA",

    "VENDOR": "NVIDIA Corporation",

    "VERSION": "4.6.0 NVIDIA 515.65.01"

 

To have full graphics support on virtual machines, update the graphics device with an appropriate driver with OpenGL support.

 

Created by MM 12/5/2022; Reviewed by TS 12/6/2022