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A comment on Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”. Parent comment

Re:Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahe... by dogma1138 on Saturday November 12, 2016 @04:22PM (#12940292)
They aren't buying consumer GPU's they aren't buying the NVIDIA dedicated servers, but they aren't running Geforce chips either.

If nothing else is that because you cannot virtualize Geforce line GPU's, there is no CUDA Direct or NVLINK support etc.

If you are telling me that Google is buying Geforce GPU's and flashing the bios with a custom bios ripped off a Quadro card so they can do PCIe passthrough in a hypervisor and initialize the cards then sorry not buying it.

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Re:Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahe... by cambion on Saturday November 12, 2016 @06:48PM (#12940893)
While I agree that Google is not buying GeForce GPUs, their general use-case for GPUs does not require virtualization.

They use containers to isolate and throttle different tasks/jobs running on the same hardware.

At their scale, virtualization would be significantly wasteful in terms of manageability and overhead.

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Re:Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahe... by dogma1138 on Saturday November 12, 2016 @07:08PM (#12940986)
I think we have different meaning for virtualization when it comes to GPU.

I'm not talking about running virtual OS, I'm talking about things like rCUDA, GPU direct and RDMA.

But still even for their containers solution they need support for gpu passtrough and vGPU if not they can't run containers.

NVIDIA doesn't allow you to run GeForce cards over a hypervisor.

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Re:Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahe... by tmzt on Sunday November 13, 2016 @12:26AM (#12942006)
Containers would imply there is no hypervisor involved, only a dri device exposed by the kernel and bind-mounted into the namespace. You would still need support for multiple contexts but that doesn't require multiple (virtual) PCI devices or an IOMMU.
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