[bonzini]

> they throttle workstation GPUs

Not sure about this, but they definitely prevent the loading of drivers for GeForce cards if they detect a hypervisor (Quadro cards work). Nvidia claims that it's a bug, and that they're not fixing it only because GeForce cards are not sold to be run in virtual machines. At the very least it's a dubious claim since for a short time there was an arms race as workarounds were figured out and the next version of the driver would detect them...

Of course it's market segmentation by obscurity so it only lasted a few weeks and it's trivial to work around, but still it's quite shady since there's absolutely no ill effect from the work around.

[throwaway2048]

It is absolutely not a bug, Disassembly of NVIDIA drivers shows that its looking for specific KVM signatures, and if you modify those signatures, magically it starts working again...

[segfaultbuserr]

Removing KVM signature is now the standard solution. But there's still a working driver patch to remove the virtualization check, it's available at here.

* sk1080/nvidia-kvm-patcher: Fixes "Bug" in Nvidia Driver preventing "Unsupported Configurations" from being used on KVM

https://github.com/sk1080/nvidia-kvm-patcher

[bonzini]

Of course it's not a bug. :-)

[Nitrolo]

Not doubting that this is the case, but what's the reason for nVidia wanting to restrict use in virtual machines?

[kmeisthax]

"Fuck you, pay me". Nvidia explicitly forbids "datacenter usage" of their drivers outside of specific licensed-for-datacenter product stacks. (The only exception is for crypto mining, for some reason.) This isn't the only product segmentation in their lineup, either. CAD software optimizations are only available for Quadro cards and up, virtual GPUs are only available for GRID cards, etc. The same GPU they'll charge $600 to gamers for will often go for $3000 or more for businesses.

[microcolonel]

> The only exception is for crypto mining, for some reason.

I think this is because they were outcompeted by AMD in the GPU crypto days, so they didn't want to get in the way of that (nor were they likely to succeed in blocking this use).

[segfaultbuserr]

Why does Intel cripple ECC and I/O virtualization [0] in high-end consumer desktop systems? Force people to buy Xeon, even if the performance is otherwise equivalent or higher for the use case. Why does Nvidia restrict virtualization? Force people to buy Quadro and Tesla.

> nVidia

FYI, a few years ago, nVidia has officially changed their name to "Nvidia"...

[0] IOMMU is not only a virtualization feature, it's also an important security feature to protect the host from DMA attacks of malicious peripherals (e.g. 1394, ExpressCard, Thunderbolt, USB 4). Fortunately Intel no longer cripples IOMMU (VT-D) since Skylake, but ECC is another story.

[MindTooth]

I believe it’s all caps.

http://international.download.nvidia.com/partnerforce-us/Bra...

[segfaultbuserr]

I stand corrected. I also found a clarification from Wikipedia on the situation.

> "From the mid 90s to early-mid 2000s, stylized as nVIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products. Now officially written as NVIDIA, and stylized in the logo as nVIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA".

[Fnoord]

True, but if isn't an acronym (correct me if I'm wrong) I am not going to use all caps. Because it feels like attention grabbing marketing BS to me.

[eyegor]

They don't want people using geforce cards in compute servers/clusters. It's artificial market segmentation since the workstation cards are higher margin. They want customers to pay the big bucks since hypervisor setups are basically only used in business and big budget settings.