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.

I'm glad Intel has been swallowing their pride on this one, I want them to succeed for once. What really would drive me to support them directly would be (para)virtualization support via SR-IOV/GVT-g. Especially given Microsoft's recent stunts an increasing amount of people (including me and close friends) are evaluating moving to Linux while keeping a Windows VM around, but both NVIDIA and AMD seem adamant about keeping those features gated to enterprise cards (even thought it's a software thing, see community efforts to reverse this[1]) so they can charge ludicrous prices to businesses for those. My opinion is that if Intel wants to get their foot in the door they should win over enthusiast by breaking patterns such as this one rather than try to compete exclusively on performance. [1]: https://github.com/DualCoder/vgpu_unlock

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).