There's not a lot of docs on how it works. It used to be entirely in the closed source driver, now it's mainly a thin bridge to the closed source firmware blob

There's not a lot of docs on how it works. It used to be entirely in the closed source driver, now it's mainly a thin bridge to the closed source firmware blob. But yes, for more than a decade now even with consumer cards, separate user processes have separate hardware enforced contexts. This is as true for consumer cards as it is for datacenter cards. This is core to how something like webgl works without exposing everything else being rented on your desktop to public Internet. There have been bugs, but per process hardware isolation with a GPU local mmu has been tablestakes for a modern gpu for nearly twenty years. What datacenter gpus expose in addition to that is multiple virtual gpus, sort of like sr-iov, where a single gpu can be exposed to multiple CPU kernels running in virtual machines.