Despite steady progress, especially on the KVM/QEMU front, desktop virtualization today still leaves much to be desired when it comes to usability. For most users, it is still complicated to create virtual machines with advanced media capabilities, including 3D acceleration. 3D-accelerated guests are a must-have nowadays and most desktop environments leverage it to provide a smooth user experience. Existing approaches attempting to grant 3D capabilities to virtual machines are not straightforward, sometimes incompatible and often require trade-offs between usability, performance and security. As a result, a successful implementation on a single host typically requires careful considerations and is often hardware-dependent. For instance, passing through real hardware to a virtual machine using vfio-pci is only possible if the piece of hardware is well-isolated in a single IOMMU group. Paravirtualization, on the other hand, and especially virtio-gpu, promises to be hardware-independent but is not (yet?) supported by all modern guest operating systems.

What if an operating system was designed to provide the best experience regardless of the guest operating system in use?