Intel Announces First Release Of KVMGT

Intel's KVMGT project is about providing full GPU virtualization for KVM.

For months we've been talking about Intel's work on Linux GPU virtualization for allowing KVM-based guests access to the Intel HD Graphics hardware for OpenGL and OpenCL compute purposes. While code has been out there for a while in development form, today Intel announced the first official release of the KVMGT project.

KVMGT is an implementation of the Intel GVT-g technology for offering full GPU virtualization. A virtual GPU instance is maintained for each VM and supports running the native graphics driver inside the VM. Intel's approach yields "a good balance of performance, feature, and sharing capability," according to the involved developers.

KVMGT is the KVM component to Intel GVT-g while Intel is concurrently working on XenGT for Xen virtualization. Intel hopes both implementations will be upstreamed into the respective code-bases. For KVMGT there's code touching the Linux kernel, QEMU, and SeaBIOS.

Those interested in Intel's Linux GPU virtualization support can read this mailing list post announcing the work. Once the code has made it upstream, we'll surely be benchmarking it at Phoronix.