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.
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.
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.
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.
Given the recent moves by Nvidia I wonder if they'd consider the holy grail of passthrough: Officially supporting (even a single) vGPU on linux so that you could use the card on the linux host and a guest.
The tech already seems possible since people have modded the enterprise drivers to do it, but that isn't official support. A few years ago I would have said there was no chance of this happening from nvidia. But I was also hopefully Intel's dedicated GPUs would support GVT-g back then!
What? Why?