When it comes to GPU virtualization we have seen AMD engineers carry out a lot of work in recent years around the Xen hypervisor even when it hasn’t seen as much interest from other vendors. We found out that much of their interest in Xen for GPU virtualization is due to automotive / in-vehicle infotainment demands and it remains that way. They continue cooking some new features and they say “the best is yet to come” in a new presentation on their Xen virtualization efforts.
AMD software engineer Ray Huang who has been a longtime contributor to their kernel driver and focusing on Xen/QEMU virtualization bits presented at the recent X.Org Developers Conference in Vienna. At XDC2025 he went over the current features as well as a look at what’s to come for AMD GPU VirtIO usage with Xen.
Some recent work has focused on supporting AMD GPU recovery on Xen for Dom0 and DomU as well as integrating Perfetto performance counter support under Xen DomU.
Arguably most enticing during this XDC2025 lightning talk was the slide “The Best Is Yet to Come.” Among the future items being worked on for AMD GPUs with the Xen hypervisor is multi-plane overlay virtualization, HIP in the ROCm stack for virtualization, and adding 3D support for Microsoft Windows guests in Xen DomU mode.
The full presentation is embedded above along with the PDF slides.
