Para-virtualized domain, hull, and geometry shaders

US8941671B2 · kind B2 · utility

Assignee

• Microsoft Corporation · US

Inventors

• Meher P. Malakapalli · Sammamish, US
• Hao Zhang · Pittsburgh, US
• Lin Tan · Chengdu, CN
• Meetesh Barua · Sunnyvale, US
• Pandele Stanescu · Santa Clara, US
• B. Anil Kumar · Saratoga, US
• Eric K. Han · Redmond, US
• Artem Belkine · Renton, US
• Jeroen Dirk Meijer · Sunnyvale, US
• Winston Matthew Penfold Johnston · San Jose, US

Key dates

• Filing date: Jan 13, 2012
• Grant date: Jan 27, 2015
• Expiry date: Jan 20, 2033

Classification

• Technology area (CPC G): Physics
• CPC primary: G06F2009/45579
• WIPO field: Computer technology
• WIPO sector: Electrical engineering

Abstract

The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for providing domain, hull, and geometry shaders in a para-virtualized environment. As such, a guest application executing in a child partition is enabled use a programmable GPU pipeline of a physical GPU. A vGPU (executing in the child partition) is presented to the guest application. The vGPU exposes DDIs of a rendering framework. The DDIs enable the guest application to send graphics commands to the vGPU, including commands for utilizing a domain shader, a hull shader, and/or a geometric shader at a physical GPU. A render component (executing within the root partition) receives physical GPU-specific commands from the vGPU, including commands for using the domain shader, the hull shader, and/or the geometric shader. The render component schedules the physical GPU-specific command(s) for execution at the physical GPU.