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Comment by throwaway48476 | Hacker News Reader

This isn't SR-IOV which is a hardware feature for virtualizimg GPUs. The problem is the OEMs that gate this feature for enterprise products. Few people buy them so the state of the software ecosystem for virtual GPU is terrible.

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Intel used to have GVT-g hardware virtualization on their integrated GPUs from Broadwell up. I haven't tried it myself but know people who used and liked it then. All good things come to an end though, and Intel scrapped it for Rocket Lake.

I would've gone and bought Intel ARC dGPUs for my Proxmox cluster if they supported hardware virtualization on their consumer line.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_GVT-g

12th gen and newer had some form of SR-IOV support in the i915 driver, but I'm not sure whether or not Intel fully upstreamed that.

Here's a project that, iirc, backported and made a DKMS for from Intel's tree: https://github.com/strongtz/i915-sriov-dkms

I also recall from that time that Intel had SR-IOV code for the iGPU (and I think their dGPUs) in the new Xe driver

My experience with GVT-g is that it mostly served as a kernel panic generator. A good idea, but the software experience just isn't stable enough.

Software takes time to mature and if almost 0 people use the feature it never will.

You don't even necessarily get it with enterprise products; last time I checked, Nvidia requires additional CAL-type licenses installed on a "certified" server from the "Nvidia Partner Network", while AMD and Intel limit it to very specific GPU product lines targeted at VDI (i.e. virtualizing your employees' "desktops" in a server room a la X/Citrix terminals).

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