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Oh I'm aware of passthrough. It's just a complete second class citizen because it isn't really virtualization, it's a hack. Virtualization is about multiplexing
by DCKing 6y ago
Oh I'm aware of passthrough. It's just a complete second class citizen because it isn't really virtualization, it's a hack. Virtualization is about multiplexing hardware. Passthrough is the opposite of multiplexing hardware: it's about yanking a peripheral from your host system and shoving it into one single guest VM. The fact that this yanking is poorly supported and has poor UX makes complete sense.
I consider true peripheral multiplexing with true GPU virtualization to be the way of the future. It's true virtualization and doesn't even require you to sacrifice and/or babysit a single PCIe connected GPU. Passthrough is just a temporary hacky workaround that people have to apply now because there's nothing better.
In the best case scenario - with hardware SR-IOV support plus basic driver support for it, enabling GPU access in your VM with SR-IOV would be a simple checkbox in the virtualization software of the host. GPU passthrough can't ever get there in terms of usability.
- fock 6y agoI have a Quadro card and at least for Windows guests I can easily move the card between running guests (Linux has some problems with yanking though). Still, virtualized GPUs would be nice.
- strstr 6y agoI guess I don't really see the benefit of "true" virtualization, other than it's usability improvements. I generally want to squeeze out ever bit of performance out of the GPU if I care to share it with the guest at all (at least on my home machine). I'd be using it for playing games. For the cloud, I could imagine wanting vGPUs so you can shard the massive GPUs that are used there. But in cloud, you would then have a single device be multi-tenant, which is a bit spicy security wise. Passthrough has a very straightforward security model.
- KabirKwatra 6y agoSRIOV would allow anyone with a single gpu to be able to get into virtualization. It would eliminate the single biggest barrier to entry in the space.