PC Graphics

[jcdick1]

With Intel supporting GVT-g (SR-IOV) even on their iGPUs (Broadwell and later), and the new Xe cards coming, I was wondering if there was a relatively modern AMD GPU that supports SR-IOV, and has VCE for running under a Citrix hypervisor.  I was hoping the new W series Radeon Pros would have it, but apparently not.  The most recent I've found is the V340, and my customer doesn't have $10k+ per card to put in their three DL380s, nor do they have the budget for Nvidia GRID licensing.  Will AMD have something retail coming in the relatively near future with SR-IOV support?

[elstaci]

Found this AMD Website about SR-IOV Support: https://community.amd.com/community/radeon-instinct-accelerators/blog/2019/11/01/what-is-sr-iov-why-... 

It mentions that it does support that feature under Citrix.

This link from the above link mentions which Professional GPU cards support that feature you want: AMD MxGPU aims to give GRID a run for its money (This article is from 2016 so there should be many more new Professional GPU cards that supports SRIOV)

Maybe AMD Forum's expert on AMD Professional GPU card fsadough‌ can shed some light on your question.

[jcdick1]

Yeah, the only cards since the S7150s (released in 2016) have been the V340 (released in 2018) and the Instinct MI series.  The only V340 I've been able to find is five figures, and the Instinct cards are not available in retail, as they are intended as part of a "data center solution."  I've found a used MI25, but I haven't seen any drivers for it under Xen, nor have I seen any specs that say whether they have the VCE engine in them for use with video sources or what codecs it might support.

[elstaci]

Maybe FSADOUGH will reply and maybe indicate which Professional cards supports that feature.

That is all that I know about your question.

Take care.

[fsadough]

At the moment the focus of AMD virtualization technology is the cloud service providers and large enterprises. Currently we do not offer any retail product supporting MxGPU-SRIOV, however that might change in near future.

[darabontors]

Hi,

Does the S7150x2 support VCE via MxGPU? Does VCE work through SR-IOV?

[fsadough]

S7150 x2 has SRIOV and VCE 3.0 support.

[darabontors]

For some reason my VM with S7150x2 MxGPU with newest drivers installed doesn't have VCE support active.I have confirmed this with 2 different software that uses VCE. The hardware encoding via VCE is disabled with bot software. What am I doing wrong?

[fsadough]

• Which remote protocol will you be running i.e. PCoIP, Blast, RDP?
• Which Hypervisor is being used, i.e. VMware ESXi, Citrix?
• What applications are you running?

• What are the system specs?
• Which guest OS and driver are you using?
• How many GPUs per server?
• How many VM-users per server?

[darabontors]

Which remote protocol will you be running i.e. PCoIP, Blast, RDP?

Parsec and steam link
• Which Hypervisor is being used, i.e. VMware ESXi, Citrix?

XCP-ng
• What applications are you running?

Parsec is not working at all. Any application that requires VCE is disabled, cannot use VCE. No hardware transcoding available.

• What are the system specs?

DELL R720 dual E5-2660, 32 GB RAM, 1 x S7150x2
• Which guest OS and driver are you using?

Windows 10
• How many GPUs per server?

4
• How many VM-users per server?

4

[fsadough]

Are you talking about your hosting system using Parsec? Parsec does not even support VMware. It is not clear to me what you are running on your server. We have MxGPU host driver for S7150 X2 on KVM Open Source, VMWare ESXi and Citrix XenServer 

[darabontors]

Yes, I am hosting with Parsec. Parsec doesn't need hypervisor support. It works on a VM or physical system, it just needs VCE or other video engine. The XenServer host driver works OK with XCP-ng, because it's the same architecture, just an open source variant. MXGPU works, virtual functions are present and assignable to VMs. It's just the VCE that doesn't work as far as I experienced.

[fsadough]

When you say MxGPU works, I assume you mean you have enabled MxGPU. If so, then you will not get VCE on each VM. VCE on FirePro S7150 X2 works only if you use the entire GPU.

[jcdick1]

Which brings us back to the original question of the thread:  Is there an AMD GPU that does support virtualized VCE under SR-IOV?

[fsadough]

No, not as a retail product.

[jcdick1]

Can the Instinct series allow multiple VMs to access the VCE functions?  Even if a particular product is available only via  channel partners, I'd like to know what it is.

[fsadough]

Yes. All Navi and Vega20 based GPUs.

[jcdick1]

fsadough wrote:

Yes. All Navi and Vega20 based GPUs.

Does that mean the RX 6x00 supports mxgpu?  They are Navi based GPUs.

[fsadough]

No. RX 6x00 is a consumer product.

[Phantasyconcepts]

I would love to see SR-IOV or some other technology supported by consumer released Radeon graphics cards and/or Ryzen processors. I am a software developer and choose to run Linux as my main OS because of Windows issues (take your pick of security, stability, or just plain brokenness). I still need to run Windows for business purposes, so I have to run in a VM. Since the cryptocurrency miners are hogging up all of the decent GPUs, consumers need a better solution to virtualization than adding an unobtainable second graphics card for sharing via pass-through. In addition, the higher power consumption for having multiple GPUs installed in the same chassis is not a very green (energy-wise) solution. Besides, nVidia isn’t yet ready to do it, but they are chewing into your server GPU market. Time to kick them to the curb with this one. Beat them to market with a consumer grade SR-IOV card.

[jcdick1]

They're seeing the same thing with XCP-NG (open source XenServer) with mxGPU ... ffmpeg or other video transcoding software can't access VCE with virtualized GPUs with either a Linux or Windows 10 guest.  Disabling the gim driver and returning to traditional PCIe passthrough restores VCE encoding/decoding.

[darabontors]

Yes. That's exactly the case. So once SR-IOV is enabled and MxGPU is added to the VM, to my knowledge no other support is needed besides MxGPU driver from AMD. My question is, if other 3D functions are working properly, why is VCE disabled when the documentation states that it should work? So is this a hardware limitation or is it a driver limitation? Is the VCE engine even capable of SR-IOV? I think it's a separate portion of the die than the 3D engine. Does someone have relevant information regarding this? 

[jcdick1]

fsadough‌

• Which remote protocol will you be running i.e. PCoIP, Blast, RDP?

For my use case, as the OP, it would be RDP (for Windows VMs) and NX (for Linux VMs w/ WM)

• Which Hypervisor is being used, i.e. VMware ESXi, Citrix?

Xen

• What applications are you running?

CG rendering, video processing

• What are the system specs?

Dual Xeon 3GHz, ram as needed

• Which guest OS and driver are you using?

None yet.  But it would be a combination of Windows and Linux

• How many GPUs per server?

1 discrete card per server, divided in whatever way maximized efficiency of CL and VCE to the VMs.

• How many VM-users per server?

However many the GPU can reasonably support

[fsadough]

@jcdick1

The questions were for darabontors‌ since he has a S7150 X2 board.

You got your answer already. See below:
At the moment the focus of AMD virtualization technology is the cloud service providers and large enterprises. Currently we do not offer any retail product supporting MxGPU-SRIOV, however that might change in near future.

[SockitPieter]

Any update on this topic ?? It's been allmost three years now...

P.