GPU Virtualization on VMware's Hosted I/O Architecture Micah Dowty Jeremy Sugerman VMware, Inc. VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94304 3401 Hillview Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94304
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION Modern graphics co-processors (GPUs) can produce high fi- Over the past decade, virtual machines (VMs) have be- delity images several orders of magnitude faster than general come increasingly popular as a technology for multiplexing purpose CPUs, and this performance expectation is rapidly both desktop and server commodity x86 computers. Over becoming ubiquitous in personal computers. Despite this, that time, several critical challenges in CPU virtualization GPU virtualization is a nascent field of research. This paper have been overcome, and there are now both software and introduces a taxonomy of strategies for GPU virtualization hardware techniques for virtualizing CPUs with very low and describes in detail the specific GPU virtualization archi- overheads [2]. I/O virtualization, however, is still very tecture developed for VMware’s hosted products (VMware much an open problem and a wide variety of strategies are Workstation and VMware Fusion). used. Graphics co-processors (GPUs) in particular present a challenging mixture of broad complexity, high performance, We analyze the performance of our GPU virtualization with rapid change, and limited documentation. a combination of applications and microbenchmarks. We also compare against software rendering, the GPU virtual- Modern high-end GPUs have more transistors, draw more ization in Parallels Desktop 3.0, and the native GPU. We power, and offer at least an order of magnitude more com- find that taking advantage of hardware acceleration signif- putational performance than CPUs.