NVIDIA Posts vGPU Manager & VFIO Variant Driver For Open-Source Nova

NVIDIA continues building out more functionality around the open-source, upstream Nova kernel graphics driver within the Linux kernel. Making it out to the mailing list this Saturday is a set of 13 patches for introducing a NVIDIA vGPU manager and VFIO variant driver.

The patches are for enabling vGPU management and supporting VFIO users with QEMU for either Linux or Windows guests, all while running off the upstream Nova kernel driver. NVIDIA continues investing quite a lot into the Nova driver stack and back when I was at NVIDIA HQ earlier this year there were some very promising remarks made about the future of NVIDIA on Linux with Nova.

The diagram shared for showing the control path enabled by this NVIDIA vGPU manager and VFIO variant driver:

Before getting too excited by some readers whenever seeing "VFIO" mentioned around GPUs, the NVIDIA physical GPU is more than likely just their workstation and data center products to be supported and not the consumer GeForce GPUs.

Those curious about this NVIDIA vGPU manager and VFIO code can learn more via this patch series. The NVIDIA Nova driver continues marching along and will be interesting to when it's ultimately ready for end-user use on the mainline kernel.