For AMD the driver is difficult to find and poorly documented (and only available on ESXi unlike NVIDIA vGPU support for Xen, Hyper-V, KVM, Nutanix, and ESXi, etc.). At least the guest drivers don't have licensing issues unlike with NVIDIA IIUC.
(and good luck finding a remotely recent AMD GIM driver)
The end result is that it is unusable in practice. Very difficult and restricted to few CPUs/GPUs and very specific software chain.
Otherwise, it'd be open source, universally available and trivial to use.
The good news is that I understand this support is actually good on the Intel side, and Intel has promised that they will actually release competitive GPUs soon. Should this truly be the case, it will automatically make Intel the go-to for GPU virtualization, and might help motivate NVIDIA/AMD to stop segmenting re: GPU virtualization, ending this shitty situation.
Nope, it’s much better on the nvidia side actually. The latest AMD GPU with a publicly accessible OSS GIM driver is the AMD S7150, which was released in 2016. (https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/MxGPU-Virtualiza...)
And it’s locked out from most AMD SKUs today, so even if you got a modern GIM driver, you’ll need very special SKUs to enable it and use virtual GPUs.
> The good news is that I understand this support is actually good on the Intel side
Not anymore. GVT-g is gone on Ice Lake (Intel 10th generation mobile, 11th gen desktop) so that you can no longer do hardware vGPU on newer Intel parts at all.
Sad thing is that what you said used to be true.
Meanwhile NVIDIA GRID needs licensing fees but actually works, with high end GPU options being available. And has all the fancy stuff like vGPU live migration for seamless maintenance too. It doesn’t even compare.
The tech already seems possible since people have modded the enterprise drivers to do it, but that isn't official support. A few years ago I would have said there was no chance of this happening from nvidia. But I was also hopefully Intel's dedicated GPUs would support GVT-g back then!