Summary
VGA Sonar is a demo application for SVGADevTap. SVGADevTap is a user-level library that communicates with the VMware SVGA guest driver to provide low-latency notifications of changes to the screen. Sonar was designed to use the devtap API to visualize application drawing patterns by rendering a scaled-down view of the desktop, replacing pixel data with color-coded rectangles. As applications update the screen, Sonar presents its scaled version of the screen using colors to denote different types of rendering commands, and whether this rendering caused a visible change to the screen. This application is called “Sonar” because the Sonar window accumulates transient updates and represents them as fading rectangles like a sonar display.
System Requirements
A Windows XP guest running the XP driver that shipped with Player 3.0/Workstation 7.0/Fusion 3.0
Instructions
Simply unzip sonar.zip and run the executable.
Video
Change Log
Engineers
![]() | Tony CannonWorks in the Enterprise Desktop group. | |
![]() | Dustin ByfordWorks in the Enterprise Desktop group. | |
![]() | Dan PhungWorks in the Enterprise Desktop group. |



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Thanks William, I just came over to ask the same question. I’m freelance so I can’t really do a partnership agreement with VMware but would love access to this API.
I’m curious about the “devtap API” is this library currently exposed public today for developers/users to access? Is there more information around it or is it only for internal use for VMware or VMware ISV/Partners?
Thanks
Hi William,
Thanks for your interest, but the SVGADevTap API is for internal use and partners. We can’t release documentation to the public.
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