So I’m looking in to adding a graphics card to my current Proxmox server, and I’ve got an older Tesla c2050 that works pretty well. I know I can do direct GPU passthrough, I’ve done it. However, I’m struggling to figure out if it can be shared among my VMs. I’m not looking to create a bunch of gaming VMs, but it would be super useful to accelerate other tasks better than the basic Proxmox vGPU could ever hope to do. I’m hoping to get my answer without having to install anything as that would require me to shut down my server
I got to looking, and SR-IOV has been around for a while now, I can find articles on it going back to easily 2009, and even in that article it’s mentioned that SR-IOV had already been in existence for a while (although graphics cards are not directly mentioned).
I suppose I’ve got three questions really,
A: Does my Tesla c2050 support this feature?
B: What was the first generation of cards that support this, how old can you go?
C: Is there a list of cards supporting this feature out there anywhere? That would be an insanely useful bit of info to have.
No Nvidia GPUs support SR-IOV per say. There are some cards with an equivalent feature called vGPU, but it is not based on SR-IOV. For newer (ie actually relevant) software and hardware, this requires expensive licensing.
Some AMD cards do have SR-IOV. There are a number of caveats to these, mainly driver support for the host. The s7150 supports ONLY ubuntu 16.04 as the host for KVM virtual machines, or you have to pay for the high priced versions of xen or vmware.
Intel has GVT-g, which is available with broadwell and newer iGPUs. It is not used that much, since Intel iGPUs are not that powerful. But it does have better software support then the nvidia and amd options do, and I think it would work on proxmox.
There is also virgl, but it is only opengl, and windows support has been pretty much stalled since 2017. https://virgil3d.github.io/
I appreciate the assistance! I had heard about the intel option, but this board doesn’t have an intel iGPU, it’s got Matrox onboard. However, I wonder… If Intel has support for it in their iGPUs, I wonder if their dedicated cards will have support for it. I don’t know, just a thought. Thanks again!
Oh sweet! Thank you! I had once ran a gaming VM server with GPU direct passthrough, so I’m at least somewhat familiar. This time I’m just looking to make the VM experience a little bit better for my users (my family) in everyday computing
