NVIDIA used this week’s KVM Forum to talk about bringing its virtual GPU support to Nova, the company’s in-tree Rust Linux GPU driver, Phoronix reports. vGPU is how you split one GPU across multiple virtual machines or containers, which is the difference between a workstation driver and something you can actually use in a cloud or lab host.
Engineers have been working on this for about a year. The short version is that it’s in progress, not finished. More of the kernel enablement is expected to land for Linux 7.5, with the rest of the kernel-side vGPU work more likely in 7.6 or later. User-space tools are being developed under vgpu-tools, and further-out items include live migration and heterogeneous vGPU support.
My take
Nova only matters for the people who have been waiting for NVIDIA to do GPU virtualization in the upstream kernel instead of a side stack. A KVM Forum status talk isn’t a release day, and I wouldn’t plan a deployment around 7.5 until the patches actually land. But the direction is right: if this gets into mainline, a lot of private clouds get simpler.
God Bless, and Happy hacking!
