NVIDIA Publishes Open-Source Linux Driver Code For GPU Virtualization "vGPU" Support

[IsolatedOctopi]

nothing stops you to use it on your workstation/pc

just that NVidia made this feature having in mind datacenter virtual machine scenarios

you can run it on your PC/Workstation

do not understand all the hate I'm reading

just there is lack of information on how to use it and people are starting to attack this new feature

[jeisom]

To all the people complaining about the consumer side, is there any demand for this among regular Joe consumers?

Or are you all under the illusion that the large corporate clients would switch to using consumer cards if only NVIDIA wasn't so evil and greedy?

Yes there is a demand. They could probably limit the number of virtual gpus with the firmware on consumer cards. Most of the consumer demand people are likely to just want to run one vm at a time after all. Obviously that doesn't cover everyone, but most of consumers who'd be interested.

[muncrief]

Yes, among people who don't want to dual-boot to game on Windows and don't want to have two separate graphics cards with one dedicated exclusively to a VM using PCIe virtualization to work around how behind higher-level 3D accelerated guest drivers tend to be.

...granted, they took so long that Proton and Windows 11 are really killing off any reasons to virtualize Windows for that purpose.

As someone who's long had a second GPU for a Windows 10 gaming VM I can say from experience that while Proton has made great strides in enabling some games to run on Linux, it is very far away from supporting all games. And of course there are also other reasons for a discrete GPU under Windows, so some way to passthrough a virtual GPU, just as we can a CPU, would be of great benefit to consumers.

The problem is that thus far even the existing limited vGPU support doesn't have Windows drivers, and in any case what is needed is a transparent vGPU that looks like and operates as the actual GPU hardware.

[jeisom]

It's nice for VDI. Can you elaborate on what you mean though? not sure I properly understood the question about desktop applications. I would expect qemu to work oob but I cannot confirm this atm

I mostly mean using it to run games, applications or Windows itself on desktop linux in a window with full gpu acceleration. I have a Windows vm that works, but is mostly useless with regards to anything that uses the gpu that I use from time to time.

Edit:

Looked over the patches as I hadn't had time earlier and it has a link to a youtube video and it has more info in the patch. Linux and windows guests will work and they have a test linux guest driver that works.

[ssokolow]

To all the people complaining about the consumer side, is there any demand for this among regular Joe consumers?

Yes, among people who don't want to dual-boot to game on Windows and don't want to have two separate graphics cards with one dedicated exclusively to a VM using PCIe virtualization to work around how behind higher-level 3D accelerated guest drivers tend to be.

...granted, they took so long that Proton and Windows 11 are really killing off any reasons to virtualize Windows for that purpose.

[Quackdoc]

I wonder how much this will help with virtualization with regards to desktop applications. Also can it be used now with qemu out of the box or does qemu need patches as well.

It's nice for VDI. Can you elaborate on what you mean though? not sure I properly understood the question about desktop applications. I would expect qemu to work oob but I cannot confirm this atm

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

To all the people complaining about the consumer side, is there any demand for this among regular Joe consumers?

Yes. Anyone doing anything with VMs where they want the GPU hardware to be available. Desktop acceleration, video encode / decode, remoting, gaming, etc. You can pass through an entire card to a single instance without this. This would let you share a single card's resources across multiple VMs simultaneously, and probably even more importantly for home users, allow you to do this with a single GPU system. Even average Joe would benefit from a Windows VM with full GPU hardware acceleration capabilities.

Or are you all under the illusion that the large corporate clients would switch to using consumer cards if only NVIDIA wasn't so evil and greedy?

No.

[zexelon]

To all the people complaining about the consumer side, is there any demand for this among regular Joe consumers?

Or are you all under the illusion that the large corporate clients would switch to using consumer cards if only NVIDIA wasn't so evil and greedy?

Average joe? No... above average joe? YES!

I would love to have this work on the 3000 & 4000 series! That said the lower end prograde cards would be worth it to me to put in a desktop if they had this and could be nicely partitioned up. Have been using GPU passthrough for many many years now and cant envision going back to anything else. It would be awesome to go forward and be able to part things up a bit further/easier.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Of course not, lol. NVIDIA exists for your money and your money only.

AMD isn't any better here. Intel is the only one supporting SR-IOV on consumer hardware, and they limit that to iGPUs. Still stupid useful for certain VM use cases like hardware decode / encode, accelerated remote desktop, etc.

I still hope someone makes this available on consumer dGPUs, even if they gimp how finely you can partition the resources. But enterprise GPUs make too much money for me to hold my breath on that one.

[sophisticles]

To all the people complaining about the consumer side, is there any demand for this among regular Joe consumers?

Or are you all under the illusion that the large corporate clients would switch to using consumer cards if only NVIDIA wasn't so evil and greedy?