In theory, it should be possible to get access to the hardware acceleration in Xvnc. The reason we're not today is probably because it is linked up inside the DDX display driver (which we of course do not have). Considering the new Gallium3D design, we should have a look and see if we can get access to the accelerated libGL from Xvnc. It would remove the need for stuff like VirtualGL. (See also bug 1116)
Note that this solution will most likely not work with proprietary drivers.
*** Bug 2905 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
A lot has happened in this space. The Linux DRM system is splitting off the display handling from the 3D rendering, which could make it easier for us to use just the 3D part. We also have VirGL which might be possible to integrate in our stuff.
Deploying VirtualGL as a GLVND library might also be interesting as it could avoid having to wrap everything with vglrun. DRC has seen some obstacles with this though: https://github.com/VirtualGL/virtualgl/issues/18
We should probably have a look at Xvfb as well. Xvnc was originally forked from it, but it has since gotten a lot of updates, among them support for DRI3 and glamor (i.e. GPU acceleration).
The glamor PR/MR for Xvfb: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/235 It has been reverted again though: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/commit/535f14656a2a42f0cca13a4264e8111300e5806d citing this issue: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/916
