The MxGPU solution on Proxmox VE 8.4 to share an AMD Radeon™ PRO W7900 Dual Slot graphics card

[laowang]

I plan to implement the MxGPU solution on Proxmox VE 8.4 to share an AMD Radeon™ PRO W7900 Dual Slot graphics card among 12 virtual machines, allowing VM users to learn simple 3D tools. Is this feasible? If possible, how should I configure it specifically?

 

[l.leahu-vladucu]

Hello laowang! The AMD Radeon PRO W7900 does not support MxGPU. The Proxmox VE wiki contains a guide on MxGPU. However:

• There are only 3 GPUs that have MxGPU support: the AMD FirePro S7100X, S7150, and S7150 x2. All these GPUs are from around 2016 and are no longer manufactured since a few years.
• The guide above notes that the support is experimental, and (to my knowledge) has not been tested in a while, so I'm not sure if it still works.

Depending on what you are trying to achieve you have other options, which are not necessarily equivalent but might help depending on your use case:

1. Use LXC containers, since multiple containers can use a GPU at the same time.
2. Use GPU passthrough - see PVE docs on GPU passthrough, as well as this wiki page. Of course, only one VM will be able to use the GPU, and GPU passthrough is not guaranteed to work.
3. Use VirGL in the VMs - see PVE docs. Please note that the guest OS needs support for the VirGL drivers.
4. Use other GPUs with support for either Nvidia vGPU oder Intel GVT-g - see PVE docs. To my knowledge, at this moment AMD does not offer anything similar, except of MxGPU, which is not supported on newer cards anyway.

 

[deepcloud]

Hello laowang! The AMD Radeon PRO W7900 does not support MxGPU. The Proxmox VE wiki contains a guide on MxGPU. However:

• There are only 3 GPUs that have MxGPU support: the AMD FirePro S7100X, S7150, and S7150 x2. All these GPUs are from around 2016 and are no longer manufactured since a few years.
• The guide above notes that the support is experimental, and (to my knowledge) has not been tested in a while, so I'm not sure if it still works.

Depending on what you are trying to achieve you have other options, which are not necessarily equivalent but might help depending on your use case:

1. Use LXC containers, since multiple containers can use a GPU at the same time.
2. Use GPU passthrough - see PVE docs on GPU passthrough, as well as this wiki page. Of course, only one VM will be able to use the GPU, and GPU passthrough is not guaranteed to work.
3. Use VirGL in the VMs - see PVE docs. Please note that the guest OS needs support for the VirGL drivers.
4. Use other GPUs with support for either Nvidia vGPU oder Intel GVT-g - see PVE docs. To my knowledge, at this moment AMD does not offer anything similar, except of MxGPU, which is not supported on newer cards anyway.

Hello,

This is not true, AMD does have multiple GPU supported by MxGPU, but they are expensive, AMD MI210, MI300X, MI325X and MI350X other cards are all end of life and no longer supported but if you can get your hands on the MI Series we do have MxGPU Supported.

 

[l.leahu-vladucu]

@deepcloud Indeed, my information was slightly out of date - there is now:

• newer MxGPU versions and a list of supported GPUs - see MxGPU-Virtualization Releases
• documentation from AMD on the newer MxGPU versions and supported GPUs
• the documentation states support for KVM and QEMU, as well as Ubuntu (which is used as the base kernel for our own Proxmox VE kernel)

At the time of my initial answer, this was still relatively new However, I do not have information about the support for Proxmox VE. Theoretically, since AMD explicitly states support for KVM, QEMU and Ubuntu, it should usually also work with Proxmox VE, but I don't have any information about this yet.