AMD Working On VirtIO GPU & Passthrough GPU Support For Xen Virtualization

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Working On VirtIO GPU & Passthrough GPU Support For Xen Virtualization

AMD is working to enable VirtIO GPU and pass-through GPU support for the Xen virtualization hypervisor with Radeon graphics...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GPU-Better-Xen

[Danny3]

And yet AMD doesn't give a fuck about proper virtualization for their GPUs by letting us to use SR-IOV so we can run games and other software that doesn't play well with compatibility layers in a virtual machine with good performance!

[Anux]

Strange, I'm playing games in a VM with good performance. You seem to be a little close minded in the selection of tools to achive it.

[cb88]

Strange, I'm playing games in a VM with good performance. You seem to be a little close minded in the selection of tools to achive it.

No they are correct there are really only 2 ways to efficiently pass through GPUs and that is SR-IOV which allows sharing between host and VM and full passthrough (host can't use it at all). Every other method of passthrough has significant CPU overhead and/or performance drawbacks.

Both those methods should result in near zero overhead and full performance not just "good" performance.

[erniv2]

The question here should be who uses xen over the kvm ?

And it´s more worriesome that the 1st reply to the patchset says wait the linux kernel cant even use the iommu properly ~~

[Quackdoc]

Nice! this could help qubes folk possibly

And yet AMD doesn't give a fuck about proper virtualization for their GPUs by letting us to use SR-IOV so we can run games and other software that doesn't play well with compatibility layers in a virtual machine with good performance!

you want server features, pay a server price. this is a great solution. sure there is no windows support. but why how many games work on wine, and how many games just wind up blocking VMs anyways, IMO this is a happy medium solution.

Strange, I'm playing games in a VM with good performance. You seem to be a little close minded in the selection of tools to achive it.

what tools are you using I wonder. if it's gpu passthrough, that is very much not an option for many people.

Strange, I'm playing games in a VM with good performance. You seem to be a little close minded in the selection of tools to achive it.

Xen based solutions are still one of the most popular, if not the most popular large scale virtualisation solutions. I can see this being very helpful for cloud gaming, and just general VDI for things like CAD. Xen can also be used on a decent number of BSDs.

[Velocity]

you want server features, pay a server price

Well that is a very pro-capitalist stance, not a very pro-technology stance. There is no technical reason not to allow SR-IOV for consumers. This is done to separate consumer and professional product lines, so it caters to the need of companies, not people who are fond of technology.

The same argument is used to discriminate ECC support and cater those only to business users because it gives them an incentive to ask for much more money while the added cost of ECC is only marginal. Professional users will not use non-ECC products and thus are forced to pay a lot more for essentially the same product. Consumers will suffer as well as their systems would be less reliable for just $10 of cost savings. But that $10 costs the companies a lot more if they lose out on ridiculously priced 'enterprise' products and companies start buying consumer products like Google did by buying cheap harddrives and using them with intelligent software to overcome the uBER 10^-14 problem.

My own conclusion is that solving the needs and providing consumers with what they want is not in the interest of a capitalist economy; for if all their problems and needs went away, so did their need and reliance on capitalist vendors. This would be the death sentence to capitalism. Microsoft called open source a 'cancer' because it destroyed economical value: a free wikipedia destroys the value of an expensive commercial encyclopedia. A free and open source webbrowser destroys the value of a paid commercial webbrowser, etc.

Instead of providing to the needs and desires of people, capitalism tends to enslave people by introducing vendor lock-ins and deprive consumers of choice, as to create an unbreakable reliance on the goods and services they provide.

This is why i believe in open source as non-capitalist alternative which focuses on common good, people's needs and desires and tries to offer all goods at the highest quality at the lowest cost, not just in price but also in terms of privacy, environmental factors and ecological footprint, etc. In such a world, features like SR-IOV and many others would not be used 'politically' but be available to anyone able to afford the economical price. In this case that is $0 because it is an articial limitation that consumers cannot use this feature, done for economical reasons as to protect sales of expensive 'enterprise' productlines.

Capitalism and open source are not friends, they are enemies.

[Quackdoc]

Capitalism and open source are not friends, they are enemies.

well, I read this bullshit, and lets call it out what it is, who is it that's adding these features that help bypass the need to use SR-IOV? Capitalism has absolutely nothing to do with open source, its not the enemy nor the ally. it is something completely separate from it.

a lot of these "capitalist" companies are what fund and work on the open source OS you use. and a lot of individuals do to. regardless of what OS it is, if its one of the major ones, BSD, Windows, Linux. etc. get out of here with the thoughtless politics bait out of here. its either a bad bait or a worse stance.

[Velocity]

Capitalist companies who 'fund' open source might very well 'buy' their way into influencing the direction of the open source community. Github is now owned by Microsoft, who called 'us' a cancer?! We can see how this is going: when they cannot beat us, they will join us and poison us from the inside.

It seems absurd to assert that "Capitalism has absolutely nothing to do with open source". Virtually all capitalist products consist of open source software or were made using at least partially open source software. Virtually every phone is powered by open source software. Even Windows uses open source components. Capitalism, while initially shy of open source, seems to have capitalized on open source big time.

This artificial limitation of SR-IOV is just a symptom of growing power of capitalism over free and liberal society models. I can design and operate open source systems, but the hardware consists of technology hostile to the user because it defends the rights of capitalist stake holders (DRM) and not the rights of the user of the technology.

If a company has contributed to an open source project, it makes me very skeptical. But apparently you people believe it's a good thing, because of faster development progress presumably. But progress toward what, exactly? Is the end-goal of the capitalists the same as the goal of those who love technology?

[Danny3]

Nice! this could help qubes folk possibly



you want server features, pay a server price. this is a great solution. sure there is no windows support. but why how many games work on wine, and how many games just wind up blocking VMs anyways, IMO this is a happy medium solution.

Playing games is a server feature?
Who the fuck said that proper virtualization is a server feature only and not a consumer one too?
If I want to run Adobe's Photoshop, Microsoft's Office, MPC-HC+MadVr with HDR passhtrought does that looks to you like I'm caring about servers or systems administration?
I just want to use the hardware that I payed in every way that see it fits what I'm trying to achieve.

If I want to share my CPU or GPU with a VM, then let me do it and stop with the artificial crap limitations!

What's the problem with that?

If I were to buy a knife, fork, spoon, hammer and use them for other purposes than they were intended, I should've payed extra?
Do you pay extra if you use your non-off-road ready card somewhere off-road and would you agree to pay extra for that?