What does HackerNews think of vgpu_unlock?

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

The vGPU feature can be unlocked for several Nvidia GPUs: https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock

I did not yet try it myself (maybe it doesn't even work anymore?), and it might not be an option for businesses.

One issue with device virtualization is that the required hardware features are often locked out in non enterprise-grade hardware (although they can sometime be unlocked, for example: https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock).

> Is that done at the driver level?

No, the FP64 units aren't physically present on silicon in high numbers on the non xx100 dies.

However, limitations enforced just by the driver and its FW set:

- GPU virtualisation (see: https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock)

- NVENC video encoder limitations to 2 simultaneous streams on customer cards

- Lite Hash Rate limitation enforcement to make GPUs less attractive for miners

Anyone interested in this setup try this if you have NVIDIA?

https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock

Looks like it can enable a virtual GPU so you don't need to actually use 2 GPUs, but I haven't tried it, it looks pretty cool if you only want to run only 1 to switch.

Is the process of unlocking these features on Nvidia GPUs similar to something like the vgpu_unlock tool is doing?[1] No affiliation, just came across it trying to find a replacement to the deprecated RemoteFX vGPU and am out of my depth.

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

I use https://github.com/danielfullmer/nixos-nvidia-vgpu + https://looking-glass.io/ very successfully

Can theoretically game on Linux and windows at same time with just a single gpu (2080 ti), mainly use it cause I only have single gpu and I don't want to loose hardware acceleration on Linux, the nixos module both applies a the vgpu unlocker for consumer graphic cards (so u can split a gpu in multiple virtual gpus) https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock

And merges it with the GeForce drivers so the host gpu does not stop having display output

And I just passthrough the vgpu and Xbox controllers to the vm with qemu and my main windows nvme disk (windows naturally just works inside and outside a vm for me, dual boot)

That's not NV related sadly, but applies for all Android TV devices. It's beyond their control...

And for PCIe VFs for virtualized GPUs, AMD does _not_ provide it either outside of their datacenter line.

Note that if you just passthrough the whole GPU, that works out of the box on NVIDIA cards.

(btw, for some NV cards, there is: https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock to crack that protection)