Open-IOV:About

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Revision as of 04:22, 12 October 2026 by WikiBot (talk | contribs) (Rewrite About for the current project (mission, principles, licensing, community))
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Open-IOV is an open-source virtualization layer for NVIDIA GPUs. It runs stock, unmodified NVIDIA drivers inside virtual machines — Linux and Windows — with GPU compute (CUDA), and eventually 3D graphics and video, on hardware you already own: without a proprietary vGPU license, without patching the guest driver, the host driver, the hypervisor or the GPU firmware.

Mission

Make NVIDIA GPUs fully virtualizable, by anyone, for any hypervisor, without modifying NVIDIA software, firmware or hardware.

How it works

The only component the project adds is a host kernel module (vgsp.ko). It implements the interface the guest driver expects to talk to — the GPU System Processor (GSP) and its resource-manager firmware — and arranges for the guest's work to execute on real GPU hardware. The guiding sentence is:

Emulate the interface. Pass through the work. Never patch anyone.

See System Overview for the architecture and Project Status for the honest current state.

Principles

  • No patches anywhere. Guest drivers, host drivers, firmware and hypervisors are all used unmodified; interoperability is the goal, not counterfeiting.
  • Honest status. Claims carry dates and evidence; the project publishes what does not work as clearly as what does.
  • Independent IP block. Open-IOV is self-contained so KVM, Xen, Argo/OpenXT, Qubes OS Air and others can carry it without forks.
  • Durability by owning the interface. The protocol, not a snapshot of it, is reimplemented — so new driver versions, firmware and hardware can be carried forward.

Licensing

Open-IOV's own code is BSD 3-Clause for everything reusable (userspace libraries, tools, scripts, configuration and documentation) and GPL-2.0 for the kernel modules that must legally link against GPL-only kernel exports (VFIO, mdev, IOMMU); per-file SPDX identifiers govern. NVIDIA's software and firmware are used unmodified and are not redistributed. See the repository's LICENSE and docs/09-reference/legal-and-licensing.md for the full statement.

Community

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