VMWare quietly acquire Tungsten Graphics

VMWare have quietly acquired Tungsten Graphics, the company behind Mesa, the TTM memory manager, Gallium3D and other Linux graphics technology. The acquisition was noted by Phoronix, who found a November 26th note on Tungsten's web site which read "November 26, 2008: Tungsten Graphics has been acquired by VMware. Open source graphics technology development will continue as part of VMware's engineering team."

Oddly for a publicly traded company like VMWare, the news does not currently appear on VMWare's press release archive. Terms of the acquisition are also undisclosed. In an FAQ on the Tungsten Graphics site, Tungsten explained that VMWare does have a history of working with the open source community on graphics drivers and that this cooperation would continue, with Tungsten saying "Our team will continue to drive the Gallium infrastructure forward and keep it up to date with the latest advances occuring in the graphics arena. This means your Gallium based driver project will benefit from these enhancements."

Graphics virtualisation is one of the more complex issues in the virtualisation business; as graphics cards have become more complex and more closely entwined with the operating system, it has become harder to efficiently virtualise the capabilities of the graphics cards. Expertise in creating graphic card neutral driver frameworks is therefore prized.

(djwm)