AMD Continues Work On Enhancing GPU Support With Xen Virtualization

In recent months AMD open-source graphics driver engineers seem to be taking more interest in supporting the Xen hypervisor with their graphics hardware. It's not clear yet externally if this is just due to customer demand or other yet-to-be-announced interest in Xen.

Back in March AMD posted patches as part of their start for adding VirtIO GPU and passthrough GPU support for Xen with AMD graphics hardware. AMD has been working on this both for HVM on DomU and PVH on Dom0 modes. Since then have also been other patches from AMD for enhancing the graphics support when making use of Xen, but again without a clear motivation why especially considering the dominance of KVM and less industry interest around Xen in more recent years.

One of the latest patch series is working on VirtGPU S3 support on Xen. Last week this patch was sent by AMD for the VirtGPU DRM driver for allowing system suspend support. Currently if trying to perform a system suspend with VirtGPU under Xen, the screen will remain black when trying to restore it while this patch takes care of two problems to address it.

Whatever the motivation, it's been great seeing AMD's recent work to enhance the VirtGPU code and focusing on better Xen support.