AMD Improving Xen VirtIO GPU Support For In-Vehicle Infotainment, Using RADV

As I've written about a few times in recent months, AMD has been enhancing GPU support for use under Xen virtualization. Their interests in Xen weren't clear to this point given that KVM virtualization tends to be the dominant solution these days when it comes to open-source Linux virtualization. Now it's been revealed that the AMD GPU interests in Xen stem from an in-vehicle infotainment play.

At the Xen Project Developer and Design Summit, AMD engineers revealed their VirtIO GPU and passthrough GPU support interests for Xen. Their interest is around automotive infotainment systems. AMD Ryzen SoCs are already used within cars like the Tesla S for infotainment systems and there are even more opportunities for AMD within automobiles since their acquisition of Xilinx that their IP can be used for LIDAR/radar purposes, camera monitoring, etc.

AMD's automotive infotainment approach is for multiple VMs running within the car for compartmentalizing the workloads. Thus Xen-based GPU virtualization is being pursued. But they've been dealing with issues such as no VirtIO GPU support currently within Xen, lack of Vulkan focus under Xen, and other current limitations that their engineers are working to overcome with the Xen and Linux graphics communities.

Via this slide deck (PDF) some of the AMD Xen GPU plans are laid out, beyond the patches already published that I've been covering on Phoronix in recent months.

Interestingly for their Vulkan support they are making use of the Mesa RADV driver that has been the unofficial AMD open-source Vulkan driver compared to AMD's official AMDVLK driver that is less popular with enthusiasts/gamers.

AMD is also working on bringing ROCm to automobiles with an OpenCL focus.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out and ultimately will benefit the Xen ecosystem as a whole for the GPU support as well as resulting improvements also to Mesa and the DRM kernel driver stack. For example there is now dGPU PRIME for Virgl pending against Mesa that was opened last week by AMD.