vGPU

XenServer has supported passthrough for PCI devices since XenServer 6.0 and this has been the defacto method for providing a GPU to a guest. With the advent of NVIDIA’s vGPU-capable GRID K1/K2 cards it will now be possible to carve up a GPU into smaller pieces yielding a more scalable solution to boosting graphics performance within virtual machines.

NVIDIA currently offer two cards, the K1 and the K2. The K1 has four GPUs and the K2, two GK107 GPUs. Each of these will be exposed through Xapi so a host with a single K1 card will have access to four independent PGPUs.

Each of the GPUs can then be subdivided into vGPUs. For each type of PGPU, there are a few options of vGPU type which consume different amounts of the PGPU. The K1 and K2 cards can currently be configured in the following ways:

Note, this diagram is not to scale, the PGPU resource required by each vGPU type is as follows:

Currently each physical GPU (PGPU) only supports homogeneous vGPU configurations but different configurations are supported on different PGPUs across a single K1/K2 card. This means that, for example, a host with a K1 card can run 64 VMs with k100 vGPUs (8 per PGPU).

XenServer’s vGPU architecture

A new display type has been added to the device model:

@@ -4519,6 +4522,7 @@ static const QEMUOption qemu_options[] =

     /* Xen tree options: */
     { "std-vga", 0, QEMU_OPTION_std_vga },
+    { "vgpu", 0, QEMU_OPTION_vgpu },
     { "videoram", HAS_ARG, QEMU_OPTION_videoram },
     { "d", HAS_ARG, QEMU_OPTION_domid }, /* deprecated; for xend compatibility */
     { "domid", HAS_ARG, QEMU_OPTION_domid },

With this in place, qemu can now be started using a new option that will enable it to communicate with a new display emulator, vgpu to expose the graphics device to the guest. The vgpu binary is responsible for handling the VGX-capable GPU and, once it has been successfully passed through, the in-guest drivers can be installed in the same way as when it detects new hardware.

The diagram below shows the relevant parts of the architecture for this project.

Relevant code

• In Xenopsd: Xenops_server_xen is where Xenopsd gets the vGPU information from the values passed from Xapi;
• In Xenopsd: Device.__start is where the vgpu process is started, if necessary, before Qemu.

Xapi’s API and data model

A lot of work has gone into the toolstack to handle the creation and management of VMs with vGPUs. We revised our data model, introducing a semantic link between VGPU and PGPU objects to help with utilisation tracking; we maintained the GPU_group concept as a pool-wide abstraction of PGPUs available for VMs; and we added VGPU_types which are configurations for VGPU objects.

Aside: The VGPU type in Xapi’s data model predates this feature and was synonymous with GPU-passthrough. A VGPU is simply a display device assigned to a VM which may be a vGPU (this feature) or a whole GPU (a VGPU of type passthrough).

VGPU_types can be enabled/disabled on a per-PGPU basis allowing for reservation of particular PGPUs for certain workloads. VGPUs are allocated on PGPUs within their GPU group in either a depth-first or breadth-first manner, which is configurable on a per-group basis.

VGPU_types are created by xapi at startup depending on the available hardware and config files present in dom0. They exist in the pool database, and a primary key is used to avoid duplication. In XenServer 6.x the tuple of (vendor_name, model_name) was used as the primary key, however this was not ideal as these values are subject to change. XenServer 7.0 switched to a new primary key generated from static metadata, falling back to the old method for backwards compatibility.

A VGPU_type will be garbage collected when there is no VGPU of that type and there is no hardware which supports that type. On VM import, all VGPUs and VGPU_types will be created if necessary - if this results in the creation of a new VGPU_type then the VM will not be usable until the required hardware and drivers are installed.

Relevant code

• In Xapi: Xapi_vgpu_type contains the type definitions and parsing logic for vGPUs;
• In Xapi: Xapi_pgpu_helpers defines the functions used to allocate vGPUs on PGPUs.

Xapi <-> Xenopsd interface

In XenServer 6.x, all VGPU config was added to the VM’s platform field at startup, and this information was used by xenopsd to start the display emulator. See the relevant code here.

In XenServer 7.0, to facilitate support of VGPU on Intel hardware in parallel with the existing NVIDIA support, VGPUs were made first-class objects in the xapi-xenopsd interface. The interface is described here.

VM startup

On the pool master:

• Assuming no WLB, all VM.start tasks pass through Xapi_vm_helpers.choose_host_for_vm_no_wlb. If the VM has a vGPU, the list of all hosts in the pool is split into a list of lists, where the first list is the most optimal in terms of the GPU group’s allocation mode and the PGPU availability on each host.
• Each list of hosts in turn is passed to Xapi_vm_placement.select_host, which checks storage, network and memory availability, until a suitable host is found.
• Once a host has been chosen, allocate_vm_to_host will set the VM.scheduled_to_be_resident_on and VGPU.scheduled_to_be_resident_on fields.

The task is then ready to be forwarded to the host on which the VM will start:

• If the VM has a VGPU, the startup task is wrapped in Xapi_gpumon.with_gpumon_stopped. This makes sure that the NVIDIA driver is not in use so can be loaded or unloaded from physical GPUs as required.
• The VM metadata, including VGPU metadata, is passed to xenopsd. The creation of the VGPU metadata is done by vgpus_of_vm. Note that at this point passthrough VGPUs are represented by the PCI device type, and metadata is generated by pcis_of_vm.
• As part of starting up the VM, xenopsd should report a VGPU event or a PCI event, which xapi will use to indicate that the xapi VGPU object can be marked as currently_attached.

Usage

To create a VGPU of a given type you can use vgpu-create:

$ xe vgpu-create vm-uuid=... gpu-group-uuid=... vgpu-type-uuid=...

To see a list of VGPU types available for use on your XenServer, run the following command. Note: these will only be populated if you have installed the relevant NVIDIA RPMs and if there is hardware installed on that host supported each type. Using params=all will display more information such as the maximum number of heads supported by that VGPU type and which PGPUs have this type enabled and supported.

$ xe vgpu-type-list [params=all]

To access the new and relevant parameters on a PGPU (i.e. supported_VGPU_types, enabled_VGPU_types, resident_VGPUs) you can use pgpu-param-get with param-name=supported-vgpu-types param-name=enabled-vgpu-types and param-name=resident-vgpus respectively. Or, alternatively, you can use the following command to list all the parameters for the PGPU. You can get the types supported or enabled for a given PGPU:

$ xe pgpu-list uuid=... params=all