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LibVF.IO: Add support for GPU Virtual Machine (GVM) (opens in new tab)

(arccompute.com)

118 pointsArcVRArthur3y ago53 comments

53 comments

41 comments · 12 top-level

punkpeye3y ago· 6 in thread

What are the practical use cases for this?

ArcVRArthurOP3y ago

For my use I tend to run a high performing Windows VM (very good with most games and other GPU accelerated programs - even chrome/adobe these days uses the GPU) inside Linux.

This can also be used for various high assurance use cases such as OpenXT / QubesOS (security by compartmentalization). For example a laptop computer being used by an automotive company for CAD to keep their information safe from other programs on the system (like a browser in another VM) the prying eyes of competitors. I made a video of that here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32585333

We have also been working on something called "LIME Is Mediated Emulation" which is a Win64 binary compatibility layer similar to WINE but using vGPUs. You can read about that here:

https://openmdev.io/index.php/LIME_Is_Mediated_Emulation

lvass3y ago

This is beautiful, you're doing the Lord's work. I absolutely loathe the current situation of MAC security being so complicated on desktops combined with graphical performance issues in compartmentalization. And surely a lot of folks are also stuck on a certain OS because GPU performance in VMs is terrible. This is very much needed.

digitallyfree3y ago

While less for general consumer use (honestly most consumers don't use CPU virtualiztion either), this has strong potential in VDI applications. Today with CPU virtualization available everywhere one inexpensive machine can host many VMs all sharing common processing power. If GPU virtualization gains traction this could mean we could be doing the same with GPUs but in an open manner (currently vGPUs are only avaliable in expensive datacenter GPUs and the tech is proprietary). Personally I would like to go with full VDI at home if inexpensive vGPU tech was available - though I guess I'm not the average home user.

> honestly most consumers don't use CPU virtualiztion either

Not that they are aware of at least :)

SXX3y ago

Practical use would be rather niche. For instance easy splitting resources of single GPU between multiple VMs if you want to run isolated instances of ML software. Or if you're need to run automated tests for your game across different OS. Or tests for any software that use GPU acceleration.

In reality most users of VFIO passthrough use it for gaming or creating multiseat systems. I guess it's will be true for vGPU feature too.

ArcVRArthurOP3y ago

There are also some benefits in load balancing GPUs. For instance processes can be controlled with controlled groups (cgroups) and niceness/thread affinity to make sure scheduling / resource allocation is done equitably between processes on the system. Using GVM and 'app VMs' it is possible to do similar things with the GPU (restrict GPU processes to a user configurable slice of the GPU so it cannot deny service to other processes on the system which are also using the GPU):

https://openmdev.io/index.php/Mdev-GPU#fbLen

Since this type of load balancing was originally used in the datacenter where virtual machine multi-tenancy was the use case the Quality of Service (QoS) functions here are fairly robust.

ArcVRArthurOP3y ago· 5 in thread

Hey, I'm the co-creator of LibVF.IO and the GVM project. I'd love to hear what you think about our latest release where we added support for GVM components in LibVF.IO.

Side note: We also added in support for Libvirt by allowing users to install standalone GVM components via ./scripts/install-standalone-gvm-components.sh.

To be honest with you I am extremely excited by what you are working towards, but utterly beyond confusion when it comes to the GPU virtualization landscape. The walls that vendors have built in this area in their attempt to artificially segment "consumer" and "professional" are shameful. NVidia in particular has been reprehensible. I wish more people cared. Thank you!

ArcVRArthurOP3y ago

Thanks for your kind words! We're all virtualization users ourselves so I definitely get what you mean - we started this project because we wanted to help people to get access to the magic at home using the hardware they already have! I will say though that Nvidia has done a lot towards improving their support for open source. While it might be a bit of an uncommon take in my view many of the folks who probably are most passionate about bringing exciting GPU technology to the world work at Nvidia. :)

MuffinFlavored3y ago

https://github.com/Arc-Compute/LibVF.IO

https://docs.linux-gvm.org/

For anybody else interested

Awesome project!

And I gotta say thats some pretty code for dealing with a bunch of sysfs stuff: https://github.com/Arc-Compute/LibVF.IO/blob/master/src/libv...

ArcVRArthurOP3y ago

Thanks!! We do our best to keep the code as clean/readable as possible. The first version was a bit of a mess but we rewrote it again clean slate to improve over the first implementation. :)

lostmsu3y ago· 5 in thread

What does it do? Does it let one pass a virtual GPU to the guest without complete PCI-passthrough? E.g. will I be able to share host GPU between the host system and guests?

How secure is that? Are users of a GPU completely isolated from eachother? Will there be side-channel attacks possible?

ArcVRArthurOP3y ago

GVM uses IOMMU for compartmentalization:

This page has a comparison of the various IO assistance modes GVM can make use of (see comparison of assistance modes, the Mdev Mode section, and the SR-IOV Mode section):

https://openmdev.io/index.php/Virtual_IO_Internals

This will probably also play a role in future developments like SIOV (Scalable IO Virtualization):

https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/20190222021927.13132-1-baolu...

amarshall3y ago

It’s mostly up to the specific hardware and its host-side drivers. I’d say that GPU compute security is a very under-studied area compared with CPU compute.

ArcVRArthurOP3y ago

Ya, that's exactly correct. :)

Melatonic3y ago

What about one GPU with multiple VM?

Annoying t hing right now is that you have to pony up for the fancy nvidia cards plus insane nvidia licensing for their multiGPU virtualized cards. AMD at least makes you only pay for the hardware but its still super pricey.

montecarl3y ago· 3 in thread

I run Linux for software development, but I need to also run Autodesk Fusion 360, which doesn't run on Linux. So I run it in a VirtualBox virtual machine. It works poorly as it sometimes doesn't render correctly and the performance is bad. I know that if I did some research and bought a second GPU that I could maybe get PCI-passthrough working, but I find that obnoxious and wasteful.

Can I use LibVF.IO/GVM to get better performance (and perhaps proper rendering) on a VM in Linux? Or is there a different solution I should be looking into?

ArcVRArthurOP3y ago

Ya, LibVF.IO & GVM are built for things like this! For example I have a friend who uses it for various Adobe programs which also don't work well on Linux.

amarshall3y ago

It depends if your GPU is supported, and such support is mostly beholden to the hardware before anything else. Currently it’s largely limited to: for Nvidia, most Maxwell, Pascal, & Turing cards; for AMD, very few obsolete cards; for Intel, gen 6–9 iGPUs.

ArcVRArthurOP3y ago

We have Ampere support working on some devices (and it is in development on other Ampere devices) as well as 11th & 12th generation Intel Xe. :)

Here's the GPU Support page if you'd like to take a look:

https://openmdev.io/index.php/GPU_Support

maldev3y ago· 2 in thread

This is pretty cool, one of the killer features that windows has had with Hyper-V that is really creaming QEMU/KVM. You could probably try getting some support from a vendor like Red Hat, as something like this in the Linux Kernel is a huge datacenter/cloud hosting feature that directly impacts their bottom line.

ArcVRArthurOP3y ago

I would love to work with folks like the people at RedHat! We're working on some new tools in C (GPLv2) which we think will make it easier to work with existing kernel/driver maintainers. We'll announce some of those things early next month and right after we'll be at QubesOS Summit & KVM Forum. I hope we get the opportunity to talk to some of the RedHat folks! :)

csdreamer73y ago

Do you have a contact where Red Hat people can reach you? (Not in the VM/Graphics space, but I can try to reach out to the right people.)

synergy203y ago· 2 in thread

GPU can not even run its own OS basically, it's a parallel co-processor, when-should/how-could I use it as a VM?

ArcVRArthurOP3y ago

According to https://docs.linux-gvm.org/

"GVM ... may be used in combination with KVM or other platform hypervisors such as Xen* to provide a complete virtualization solution via both central processing (CPU) and graphics processing (GPU) hardware acceleration."

Most current GPUs could, even with the public programming info. The limitations in interrupt handling would eat into either functionality or performance somewhat I think.

stuaxo3y ago· 2 in thread

Can I use this to with an AMD APU, like the graphics on a Ryzen ?

ArcVRArthurOP3y ago

Unfortunately there is limited support on AMD. I would like to try to make it better though!

https://openmdev.io/index.php/GPU_Support

MuffinFlavored3y ago

What's one of the biggest things AMD could go to help you turn this into a reality? Just... documentation? Source code examples?

Which... I'm assuming they'll never do?

yissp3y ago· 1 in thread

Is this similar to the virglrenderer project? https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/virgl/virglrenderer

ArcVRArthurOP3y ago

It is slightly different - this runs an unmodified GPU driver in the guest (no para-virtualization) and in our observations our performance is close to native which I believe is a fair improvement over the overhead of Virgl. Also there's availability of more APIs - for example DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL work with GVM guests. I don't think all of those work with Virgl. We make use of various different assistance modes (either hardware or software I/O virtualization/resource sharing) via VFIO-Mdev (VFIO Mediated Device), or via SR-IOV (Single Root IO Virtualization), or SIOV (Scalable IO Virtualization).

I made this web page to try consolidate some information from various folks who have contributed a lot in this area of open source to show how it works (there are some novel additions we've made as well based on our own work with GVM):

https://openmdev.io/index.php/Virtual_IO_Internals

rcarmo3y ago· 1 in thread

I really want this to work on AMD hardware.

ArcVRArthurOP3y ago

I hope I can work with them some time to improve support! I outlined a few things they would need to do to help support GVM using the amdgpu driver on this page:

https://openmdev.io/index.php/AMDGPU

Ideally some folks who know about amdgpu might consider helping our open source community by adding similar information to that page to the information we added on the Nvidia Open Kernel Modules page:

https://openmdev.io/index.php/OpenRM

If that could be done then we would do our best to add in AMD support to GVM.

ajvs3y ago· 1 in thread

What's the recommended GPUs with best performance:cost?

ArcVRArthurOP3y ago

That depends on your use-case. In general I would recommend you consider purchasing Nvidia's GPUs for the best price/performance and GVM support. Intel's Xe architecture is currently improving but the performance isn't quite there for a number of use-cases however some appear to work quite well and I expect that will improve with time. The 2080Ti works well with current software. If you are a developer and would like to help us improve support for devices you can purchase a 3090Ti (support in GVM for this device is under active development).

habobobo3y ago· 1 in thread

Is it possible to use this for a remote gpu solution somehow?

ArcVRArthurOP3y ago

That depends on the driver implementation and what exactly the features are that you are looking for. In general if you're using virtualization tools like KVM/Xen you can configure a computer to make virtual machines that can be accessed remotely (for example you would likely want to configure the network to provide your machine with an IP address). You can use GVM for GPU accelerating various programs like those that use DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL so if that meets your needs from a remote machine and you have the necessary resources (networking resources such as IP addresses, time and know-how to configure such a setup) then I would say yes.

Teever3y ago

Can I use this with Proxmox?

I looked into LibVF.IO when it was last posted on hackernews but I was never able to get it to work with Proxmox.

I'm kind of a weirdo and want to use proxmox as a hypervisor on my desktop and manjaro as my daily driver with Windows 10 for Fusion360.

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