It's really really a pity gpu makers are so stingy about virtualization, so we could just have guests have some hardware. Virgl is a wondeful & excellent paravirtualization-ish, but being dumped on our ass by every hardware maker to paravirtualize when the hardware coupl very easily let us virtualize is super stiff.

There were a couple hot minutes where it seemed like Intel was pushing to make everyday gpus have some virtualization... Intel GVT-g and I feel like there were other efforts Intel was up to. But since Gen 11 GPu, Intel has dropped support & this seemingly is dead end. I dont think Arc improved things. There's a lot of chatter about sr-iov but unclear what if any consumer products have support... can someone run a lspci and just tell us please if there are virtual functions available? It might be a mode that has to be enabled, but the evidence might alsp be right there staring us in the face.

Even gaming consoles have a better story with parallel graphics work. I keep thinking of the ps4 (2013), which had a semi-stunning 8 command queues.

Hardware segmentation in general is just pretty unfortunate. Another example I saw mentioned recently was in-band ECC - Intel’s memory controller apparently supports this but is only enabled in some limited scenarios [0]. If I could enable in-band ECC on my workstation I absolutely would.

Given that some folks did manage to unlock the VGPU functionality on consumer GPUs [1] the silicon is certainly capable, but I guess Nvidia doesn’t want to cannibalise their data centre sales.

[0] - https://edc.intel.com/content/www/us/en/design/ipla/software...

[1] - https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock