Documentation
An absence of critical technical documentation has historically slowed growth and adoption of developer ecosystems for GPU virtualization.
This CC-BY-4.0 licensed content can either be used with attribution, or used as inspiration for new documentation, created by GPU vendors for public commercial distribution as developer documentation.
Where possible, this documentation will clearly label dates and versions of observed-but-not-guaranteed behaviour vs. vendor-documented stable interfaces/behaviour with guarantees of forward or backward compatibility.
This is the index of the Open-IOV wiki. If you are new, read Project Status first, then System Overview. The wiki is a curated public view of the project's maintained documentation; each page names its canonical document in the repository.
Start here
- Project Status — what works today, what is in progress, what is not started
- Install and First Run — build, load, and a stock guest driver in about half an hour
- System Overview — the architecture in one page
- FAQ — common questions, including "why is nvidia-smi working but CUDA not?"
Architecture
- System Overview — principle, layer map, data flows
- GSP and GSP-RM — the firmware interface the project emulates
- The Host Module (vgsp.ko) — virtual device, emulation core, memory model, forwarding
- The Guest Stack and CUDASW — what runs unmodified inside the guest
- The vGSP Execution Plane (vEP) — the execution and completion layer
- Introduction to GMMU — GPU address translation from first principles
- UVM in the Guest — unified memory, semaphores, page trees
- GMMU Multi-Tenant Protection — isolation design for multiple VMs and tenants
- Physical GPU Backend and Guest Wiring — how guest work reaches real hardware
- Guest Driver Lifecycle: A Field Guide — boot to CUDA, with real control IDs and log signatures
CUDA
- CUDA Userspace Driver — the
libcuda.sodeep dive - The Execution Frontier — the GR compute-launch chain and its current wall
Firmware and reverse engineering
- GSP 570.144W Firmware Analysis — how the 28.5 MB image was decompiled and mapped
- Address Reference — firmware-side address tables
- risc-v-gsp-rm-debugger — the firmware runtime workbench (hooks, watchpoints, sessions)
- Historical protocol analyses, kept for the record: RPC Message Format · BAR Emulation Specification · WPR Management · Migration Protocol · GSP RPC Emulation · Error Codes · vGPU-IO Integration Guide
Portability and ecosystem
- Hardware and Software Matrix — Reference / Target / Experimental, honestly labelled
- HAAEEP and Collaboration — the agent-edge use case, collaboration and licensing models
Reference
- Glossary
- FAQ
- Error Codes — historical naming, superseded by the wire status values
History
This wiki previously hosted the OpenMdev / LibVF.IO project documentation (2021–2023). The pages below are archived for reference; they describe earlier projects and architectures, not Open-IOV.
- Introduction · Virtualization Fundamentals · Virtual I/O Internals · GPU Driver Internals · GPU Firmware · GPU Support · CPU Support · Hypervisor Support · Merged Drivers · OpenRM · AMDGPU · Intel · Mdev-GPU · GVM · Hyperborea · LIME Is Mediated Emulation · LibVF.IO Setup Guide · Looking Glass KVMFR · VGPU Unlock · GPU Software Bill Of Materials (SBOM)
Meta
- About Open-IOV
- Community
- Wiki architecture pages name their canonical source in the repository; when a page and its source disagree, the repository wins.