Concept of virtual machine based high resolution display wall

Abstract

This paper presents the scalability and hardware dependency problems found in existing solutions in the high resolution display wall domain and proposes a new solution. Authors propose hosting the system that provides the visual content for the display wall inside a virtual machine. In such way any needed configuration of displays and resolutions can be applied to the graphics processing unit simulated by the virtualization system. The frame buffer content of the virtual graphics processing unit is then split, encoded with H.264 and sent over gigabit Ethernet as an RTP stream to the display wall. The display wall is driven by Raspberry Pi embedded devices that receive the stream, decode it and send digital video signal to the displays. This paper describes the construction of a prototype for this architecture and provides preliminary results that prove the potential of this solution.