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Comment by compsciphd | Hacker News Reader

isn't this natively supported by nvidia?

i.e. you have a vgpu card (or a consumer card you an map to the equivalent vgpu card) and nvidia drivers and tools lets you load drivers that essetially partition it into XGB (all partitions being the same X) and then you just gpu passthrough the newly created device that maps to a single partition into the vm?

the whole trick being the ability to trick nvidia's drivers into thinking that the consumer gpu is really the server model, but otherwise it becomes just normal nvidia usage?

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Yes the functionality is available on nvidia quadro cards and nvidia very recently added the same options to some of their more recent consumer cards specifically for HyperV.

I will say though from a hobbyist point of view this project is just great. If you're trying things and spinning up VMs just to see what you can do then one of the first bottle necks is going to be that you can't use dedicated graphics (without passing through the whole card, and then you need a card per VM). This project makes it a lot easier for anyone fiddling rather than doing stuff commercially, especially with current GPU prices.

It's natively supported by all of the GPUs listed, the trick is indeed bringing this to the consumer space for the first time as it has always been model locked and sometimes (e.g. Nvidia) license locked. The exception to these restrictions is with the Intel method.

Nvidia co-wrote the VFIO-Mdev API in partnership with Intel where it is used as a kernel interface for GVT-g mediated GPU devices (as well as Nvidia mediated devices). My (totally baseless) guess would be that Nvidia saw this market change coming with Intel ARC GPUs leaving vGPU functionality enabled across the consumer lineup and rather than getting left behind by a big change they helped bring it about. We're just exposing the capabilities of that API to the user across vendors and making it easy to interface with.

Ya, libvf.io works on nearly all recent Nvidia consumer cards with the exception of Ampere. The same goes for Intel GPUs like the DG1/DG2. There is no need to use a server card.

Edit: There's not really an explicit need to trick the card. Nvidia co-wrote the VFIO-Mdev API with Intel and RedHat which is what we use. If you want to use the optional nv merged driver package that will do some of the things you mention but it's not required.

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