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Comment by dtx1 | Hacker News Reader

As a linux-only user (and gamer), nvidia is a plain no-go for me so i just hope that rdna2 is not entirely disappointing like RDNA1 was. For us Linux gamers a working VFIO on a consumer card would be a dream of course since nvidia is locking that to their workstations cards, maybe AMD just throws it in as a goody.

Zen3 is propably gonna kick-butt, especially in any non-gaming task perhaps AMD will inch closer to Intel in gaming loads aswell, but i don't care too much.

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I will get a 3000 series. While I've never actually owned a AMD graphics card.... (25 year Linux guy) For a really long time AMD on Linux was absolute garbage, like lower end NVIDIA beating the this crap out of high end AMD. And I really appreciate the open source stuff, it seems to still be problematic. The other issue is, I use DaVinci Resolve which works a million times better with NVIDIA than AMD, even if it works at all.

I have had perfect working VFIO setups with both the 1070 and 1080ti from nVidia, there are many comprehensive guides and working around the driver error code 43 is quite trivial.

That's nice but an error thats designed to fuck me as a customer is a good reason not to buy from that company, and the general state of nvidia drivers on linux makes me not want to chose them for a new build. Nonetheless, i'm glad to hear you got it working, it sure is a fun thing to do.

> the general state of nvidia drivers on linux

... is great? They have been well supported for decades, has working drivers for every GPU on release day and even 10+ year old cards get updated drivers for new kernels / X servers whereas AMD takes months/years to have usable drivers in a stable kernel.

Is that so? I always here: stay away from nvidia on Linux, especially but not limited to using Wayland. Is that truly not the case?

Well, my experience [1] has been nearly perfect, certainly much better than what I've had with AMD. Nvidia has been pretty much plug&play for me for a long time, with very few issues.

For Wayland yes, Nvidia is using a different approach than AMD/Intel so most desktop environments don't support the Nvidia way, resulting in a poor experience. That said, Wayland desktops as a whole are still quite some time away from reaching feature parity with X, so I'm not too worried just yet.

[1] For reference, I've been using Linux (and only Linux) on the desktop for ~18 years.

Until NVIDIA decides to "fix" the workarounds, again.

Wouldn't SR-IOV support (which is rumored in nvidia's chips) make vfio on this kind of setup possible?

VFIO doesn't work with Nvidia devices because of a design decision by Nvidia. Their drivers refuse to load in a virtualized setting unless you buy their enterprise GPUs. You can patch out a few checks and everything works again. Another option is to reload the GPU firmware before the virtualization host boots so the GPU doesn't know it's the second time it boots.

Even if it's possible to implement proper VFIO for Nvidia GPUs, I expect them to fight such an implementation with tooth and nail in their drivers. This is the same company that artificially limits the amount of transcoding streams in their drivers, mind.

VFIO is already possible with amd if you have supporting hardware i.e. i was running single vega guest windows guest and linux furyx host on tr4 board but with sr-iov you could run many guests using same gpu, i think stadia uses this now. There were also rumor that vega has sr iov but disabled on hardware

Uh, yeah you are right i meant SR-IOV

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