[ale] VMs sharing native GPU

Kyle Brieden via Ale

2018-05-09 22:37:39 UTC

Did some digging around, and it looks like the only GPUs that support
virtualization like what we're talking about are nVidia's Tesla series
cards, which can be anywhere from $2,000 to upwards of $20,000 per card.
Also, there's a yearly licensing scheme to go with it. So no
consumer-grade cards can be chunked down like what I was thinking. :(

https://docs.nvidia.com/grid/6.0/grid-vgpu-release-notes-red-hat-el-kvm/index.html
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/design-visualization/technologies/virtual-gpu/

Bummer, that would have been a TON of fun to play with. I have 2 "one
day" goals:
1. Multiple-person gaming rig. Would need 2 gfx cards to PCI
passthrough to each windows VM.
2. A linux box running a hypervisor with a monitor and keyboard, then 2
VMs, one windows and one macos, running on it. PCI passthrough a card
to each VM so that the monitors on my desk are each respective desktop.
Then pass USB ports to each VM and have a mouse/keeb on a switch. That
or if I could just get Synergy to run on that, it would be perfect.

And because I know you're thinking it, the answer to "Why?" is "Because
I can." It would be fun for me and something to brag about to nerds
like us. :D

---
Very respectfully,
Kyle Brieden

Post by Kyle Brieden via Ale
I did not know about this! I'm definitely interested, though. I'll
go dig on it and if I find anything juicy, I'll put it back on the
list. This is really exciting :D
---
Very respectfully,
Kyle Brieden

There's some new NVidia stuff that supports virtual GPUs. It works
similar to have VMs work, carve a big system into smaller systems.
It's supported in Ovirt so it's supported by KVM. It does require
rather new GPU and cuda 9+

KVM/QEMU and Xen both support PCI Passthrough, but it's been my
understanding that PCI Passthrough assigns that resource directly to
the
guest/DomU. Nothing, not even the hypervisor/Dom0 has access to it
anymore. I don't think it'll be possible to "share" a PCI device
like
that with multiple VMs running at the same time.
---
Very respectfully,
Kyle Brieden

Which hypervisor is best for PCI-E passthrough? I'd like to setup
a shared GPU on a VM server with a virtualized Ubuntu and a MS Win
instance that could share a GPU for accelerated graphics. I'm just
looking to get pointed in a direction that is open source, but
known to work. Sincerely, Dow âDow Hurst, Research Scientist 340
Sullivan Science Bldg. Dept. of Chem. and Biochem. University of
North Carolina at Greensboro PO Box 26170 Greensboro, NC
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