Intel discontinued Graphics Virtualization Technology (GVT-G) support several generations ago in favor of supporting SR-IOV for graphics virtualization with Iris Xe and newer integrated/discrete graphics hardware. But with the transition as well from the Linux i915 to Xe kernel graphics drivers, the official SR-IOV support state on Intel graphics is in a bit of an awkward state.
9elements cyber security developer Marcello Sylvester Bauer raised the issue of the awkward state of Intel graphics SR-IOV support under Linux. In particular, Intel’s upcoming Panther Lake SoCs with Xe3 integrated graphics is ready to go with official SR-IOV support but current Arrow Lake processors with integrated graphics lack official SR-IOV support. Meanwhile for prior generation Meteor Lake, SR-IOV support is only official with the older i915 driver and not the Xe driver.
The issue was raised on the Linux kernel mailing list. The response from an Intel engineer attributed it to the official driver coverage and limiting the SR-IOV support to areas where they are testing with their public continuous integration (CI) testing farm:
“Since platforms before [Lunar Lake] are not officially supported by the Xe driver, we have only enabled SR-IOV on those SDV platforms which are actively used and tested by our public CI.”
Changing it for existing platforms to formally support SR-IOV with the Linux driver doesn’t look like it will happen:
“[As far as I know] it’s unlikely. While in case of [Tiger Lake] the enabling is just a one-liner patch with new .has_sriov flag, however for robust [Meteor Lake] it would require much more SR-IOV specific code to be added, but there is no point to add anything until those platforms itself will be fully tested in the native mode (non-virtualized).”
So it’s good that Panther Lake is ready to go with SR-IOV graphics support but for current Intel platforms the SR-IOV state is less than desirable.
