[lawl]

Amd changed their windows drivers to not output video if it detects its running in a VM. Nvidia went the other way and stopped doing so.

Both can/could be bypassed with some libvirtd xml magic, but still. Nvidia seem to slowly stop being assholes, AMD started already.

[brezelgoring]

>Amd changed their windows drivers to not output video if it detects its running in a VM.

What? Why?

[lawl]

Presumably market segmentation. You're only allowed VMs that dont feel like shit (i.e. have gpu accel) if you pay for enterprise vGPU shit. Can't have someone buy two of your GPUs to give one to a VM, obviously.

[kaladin-jasnah]

> pay for enterprise vGPU

For AMD the driver is difficult to find and poorly documented (and only available on ESXi unlike NVIDIA vGPU support for Xen, Hyper-V, KVM, Nutanix, and ESXi, etc.). At least the guest drivers don't have licensing issues unlike with NVIDIA IIUC.

[my123]

And very few AMD GPUs even support it...

(and good luck finding a remotely recent AMD GIM driver)

[snvzz]

Plus the quality of the overall experience. And I understand NVIDIA is even worse re: GPU virtualization.

The end result is that it is unusable in practice. Very difficult and restricted to few CPUs/GPUs and very specific software chain.

Otherwise, it'd be open source, universally available and trivial to use.

The good news is that I understand this support is actually good on the Intel side, and Intel has promised that they will actually release competitive GPUs soon. Should this truly be the case, it will automatically make Intel the go-to for GPU virtualization, and might help motivate NVIDIA/AMD to stop segmenting re: GPU virtualization, ending this shitty situation.

[my123]

> And I understand NVIDIA is even worse re: GPU virtualization.

Nope, it’s much better on the nvidia side actually. The latest AMD GPU with a publicly accessible OSS GIM driver is the AMD S7150, which was released in 2016. (https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/MxGPU-Virtualiza...)

And it’s locked out from most AMD SKUs today, so even if you got a modern GIM driver, you’ll need very special SKUs to enable it and use virtual GPUs.

> The good news is that I understand this support is actually good on the Intel side

Not anymore. GVT-g is gone on Ice Lake (Intel 10th generation mobile, 11th gen desktop) so that you can no longer do hardware vGPU on newer Intel parts at all.

Sad thing is that what you said used to be true.

Meanwhile NVIDIA GRID needs licensing fees but actually works, with high end GPU options being available. And has all the fancy stuff like vGPU live migration for seamless maintenance too. It doesn’t even compare.

[kevincox]

Because the drivers for the consumer GPUs are not licensed for datacebter use and obviously VM == datacenter

[lokedhs]

This is a problem for QUbes OS which has a legitimate need for vgpu on a desktop operating system.

It's because of this arbitrary restriction that Qubes is not able to provide GPU acceleration, which is a huge barrier to its adoption.

[ridgered4]

Wow, I hadn't heard that AMD added that check. Between that and their unending reset problems that makes them a completely inferior choice for GPU passthrough. Before Nvidia stopped the passthrough blocking you could make a case that AMD was a better choice.

[namlem]

The cycle continues