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Does anyone know if any open source hypervisor supports vGPUs? It looks like XenServer and vSphere are the only two hypervisors that support virtual graphics cards (true vGPU, not passthrough or software emulated). I was poking around the internets for an open source project/library that accomplished this but couldn't find anything. Specifically, I also couldn't find any mention of vGPU support in the true open source (not Citrix branded) Xen hypervisor roadmap.

dkobran
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    What do you mean by "vGPU"? – Michael Hampton May 19 '15 at 04:10
  • @MichaelHampton vGPU is basically virtualization of the GPU/Graphics card allowing the virtual machines to share the physical GPU on the host. nVidia is the main driver of this and it allows you install the native nVidia drivers for the GPU in the virtual machine for graphics acceleration. Main drivers are CAD/3D type work. – Rex May 19 '15 at 04:24
  • This is a little different than the vSGA that VMWare has had for a while. vSGA required drivers installed on the hypervisor and a specific driver installed on the guest. vGPU makes a virtual GPU available directly to the guest - and the native video drivers are installed directly in the guest. – Rex May 19 '15 at 04:27

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From what I understand, vGPU requires support at various layers.

  1. Hardware - only specific GPU's support vGPU functionality.
  2. Hypervisor - Citrix and VMWare are the only ones that I am aware of that support vGPU functionality. I'm not aware of anything in the full/free/open source Xenserver that provides this.
  3. VDI - The method you use to connect to the guest using the vGPU matters if you want to take full advantage of the GPU. As of right now, I believe only XenDesktop (Citrix), RemoteFX (Microsoft), Horizon (VMWare) are taking full advantage of vGPU as a published desktop.

On a side note, Citrix XenServer is free and (mostly) open source. You may be able to take the various packages that provide the vGPU pieces and apply them as needed..

Rex
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  • It looks like the Citrix XenServer edition that supports vGPU is not open source ie you need an expensive license to run the "Enterprise Edition." It's a really strange relationship they have with XCP/Xen Project/XAPI where they pull down all the open source code, package it up as "XenServer" (which adds a few features like vGPU support), and sell it commercially. Otherwise, the two products are identical. I guess I was wondering if anyone knew if Xen was planning on releasing their own vGPU support but I don't see any mention of it anywhere. – dkobran May 19 '15 at 17:25
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    Open source zen project supports XenGT "XenGT is a full GPU virtualization solution with mediated pass-through, on Intel Processor Graphics. "https://blog.xenproject.org/2014/03/11/xen-graphics-virtualization-xengt/ – Keith Reynolds Oct 16 '17 at 19:27
  • Not sure if this is vgpu, but open source kvm supports gpu pass through. – Keith Reynolds Oct 16 '17 at 19:56
  • This is a little old now, but I wasn't aware that XenGT supported vGPU, so.. good to know. GPU pass through isn't quite the same as vGPU solutions. A pass through solution implies that the whole GPU would be dedicated to only the single VM assigned an couldn't be shared with other systems running on host. – Rex Oct 17 '17 at 14:43