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Comment by montecarl | Hacker News Reader

I run Linux for software development, but I need to also run Autodesk Fusion 360, which doesn't run on Linux. So I run it in a VirtualBox virtual machine. It works poorly as it sometimes doesn't render correctly and the performance is bad. I know that if I did some research and bought a second GPU that I could maybe get PCI-passthrough working, but I find that obnoxious and wasteful.

Can I use LibVF.IO/GVM to get better performance (and perhaps proper rendering) on a VM in Linux? Or is there a different solution I should be looking into?

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Ya, LibVF.IO & GVM are built for things like this! For example I have a friend who uses it for various Adobe programs which also don't work well on Linux.

It depends if your GPU is supported, and such support is mostly beholden to the hardware before anything else. Currently it’s largely limited to: for Nvidia, most Maxwell, Pascal, & Turing cards; for AMD, very few obsolete cards; for Intel, gen 6–9 iGPUs.

We have Ampere support working on some devices (and it is in development on other Ampere devices) as well as 11th & 12th generation Intel Xe. :)

Here's the GPU Support page if you'd like to take a look:

https://openmdev.io/index.php/GPU_Support

Love this project. I nerded out on GPU passthrough several years ago and learned a lot. GPU sharing would be a killer feature for some of my workflows.

Recently, after being a long-time Nvidia customer, for Linux systems I've switched to AMD GPUs and have been very impressed with the amdgpu driver quality relative to Nvidia's proprietary driver. Do you have any thoughts on what the LibVF/GVM future looks like for AMD devices?

It is my understanding that both NVIDIA and AMD try to lock their vGPU functionality behind enterprise paid features and hardware. it is a big shame really. If people could run vGPUs in Linux at near native speed, the purely Windows market would shrink much quicker.

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