GPU passthrough with bhyve - Corvin Köhne - EuroBSDcon 2022
Channel: EuroBSDcon
Date: 2022-10-27

This presentation is a follow up of my presentation at the FreeBSD Vendor
Summit in 2021. It focuses on the current state of GPU passthrough with a bhyve VM.

FreeBSD includes the bhyve hypervisor to create virtual machines. In order to
increase the performance of a VM, bhyve supports PCI passthrough. When using PCI passthrough, a PCI device is exclusively assigned to a VM. Even the FreeBSD system has no access to the PCI device. Therefore, the VM can directly access the PCI device without any emulation. The support for PCI passthrough doesn't include GPU devices because they require some special handling.

We are actively working on a solution to add GPU passthrough support to bhyve. In 2021 many GPUs were supported in an off-tree branch. In the meanwhile many changes regarding GPU passthrough are merged into upstream bhyve. For that reason, it's supported on some hardware and some guests now. The presentation will talk about which hardware and guests are supported on upstream bhyve, how GPU passthrough can be used and what has to be done to support more hardware and guests.