Flex 170 GPU from Intel - Subscription Free GPU Accelerated VDI on Proxmox 8.1
Level1TechsCited 4× on HN, 2024–2025
demo · advanced · 2024–2025 on HN
Level1Techs' Wendell shows Intel's Flex 170 GPU providing GPU-accelerated virtual desktops on Proxmox 8.1 without subscription licensing, using SR-IOV, and demonstrates many desktop instances running at once.
Referenced in discussions of GPU virtualization and VDI as a demo of licensing-free GPU sharing.
Up next
14 mo on HNThe Tragedy of systemd
linux.conf.au
16 HN recommender · 2019–2025
11 mo on HNThe Thirty Million Line Problem
Molly Rocket
11 HN recommender · 2018–2024
10 mo on HNVCF East: Ken Thompson interviewed by Brian Kernighan
Vintage Computer Federation
11 HN recommender · 2019–2025
9 mo on HNLISA11 - Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos
USENIX
9 HN recommender · 2012–2026
9 mo on HNUSENIX ATC '21/OSDI '21 Joint Keynote Address-It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware
USENIX
12 HN recommender · 2021–2026
8 mo on HNAT&T Archives: The UNIX Operating System
AT&T Tech Channel
10 HN recommender · 2013–2026
8 mo on HNTempleOS | Down the Rabbit Hole
Fredrik Knudsen
7 HN recommender · 2019–2022
7 mo on HNUnix and Google
FOAM
4 HN recommender · 2016–2023
6 mo on HNBryan Cantrill on Jails and Solaris Zones
PapersWeLove
6 HN recommender · 2016–2025
6 mo on HNContainers From Scratch • Liz Rice • GOTO 2018
GOTO Conferences
6 HN recommender · 2018–2025
6 mo on HNUser-level threads....... with threads. - Paul Turner - Google
Linux Plumbers Conference
6 HN recommender · 2013–2024
5 mo on HNBryan Cantrill from Joyent on Manta: internet-facing object storage facility that features compute
AI Council
4 HN recommender · 2014–2026
4 comments from Hacker News
Some counter points. On the die size argument, which I see being echoed a lot online: Why would a customer care or factor that into their purchasing decisions? Saying that these dGPUs with large dies are what is going to put Intel out of business is ludicrous and the Xe cores are shared amongst many of Intel's most lucrative products. You can afford larger dies on N4 compared to when the 40-series were launched. It's no longer the leading edge node and yields have likely improved. dGPUs have pretty expensive GDDR modules, I do not have data on the exact proportion but I would bet that the memory modules is the more important line item. BoM matters less on lower volume (compared to mobile SoCs) dGPU units. Masks masks, R&D and validation are big fixed up-front costs. Recurring software support is also independent of how many units get sold. Xe cores are shared by many Intel products (client & server CPUs, datacenter GPUs and gaming GPUs). B580 is widely popular for gamers, Intel cannot keep up the demand at the moment. I doubt they need to unlock SRIOV on the gaming segment dGPUs to get rid of stock, as you seem to suggest. Their datacenter GPUs [1] offer support for SRIOV, as you probably already know, so I assume you are bemoaning market segmentation. [1] ▶ this video -- Wendell's video on Flex 170 GPU from Intel - Subscription Free GPU Accelerated VDI on Proxmox 8.1
gpu passthrough for VMs is not supported on apple silicon period afaik. there may be some "native" renderer built on top of metal but apple doesn't support SR-IOV or "headless passthrough". link otoh no, it is not "more or less [automatic]" in other hardware either, SR-IOV has been on the enthusiast wishlist for a ridiculously long time now because basically nobody implements it (or, they restrict it to the most datacenter-y of products). intel iGPUs from the HD/UHD Intel Graphics Technology era have a concept called GVT-g which isn't quite SR-IOV but generally does the thing. Newer Xe-based iGPUs do not support this, nor do the discrete graphics cards. AMD's iGPUs do not have anything at all afaik. Their dGPUs don't even implement reset properly, which is becoming a big problem with people trying to set up GPU clouds for AI stuff - a lot of times the AMD machines will need a hard power reset to come back. NVIDIA GPUs do work properly, and do implement SR-IOV properly... but they only started letting you do passthrough recently, and only 1 VM instance per card (so, 1 real + 1 virtual). Curious what you're using (I'm guessing intel iGPU or nvidia dGPU) but generally this is still something that gets Wendell Level1techs hot and bothered about the mere possibility of this feature being in something without a five-figure subscription attached. ▶ this video It does suck that Apple refuses to implement vulkan support (or sign graphics drivers), I think that's de-facto how people inter
There are new VDI contenders still coming up though. This caught my attention recently (due to trialling Proxmox for another purpose): ▶ this video There's clearly still demand for VDI solutions too. A recent example: link
Like most thing in Windows, the sauce is buried under layers of Registry tweaks and/or Group Policies, but enabling RemoteFX (released with Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1) for RDP enables both h.264/h.265 stream compression, and with additional settings changes to enforce usage of the GPU on the desktop session over RDP, you can get solid 3D acceleration. In this video from Wendell @ Level1Techs, he had 31 virtual desktop instances all running with full GPU acceleration, with RDP as the VDI client software. ▶ this video . As another data point, I had game developers remoting into their workstations during Quarantine, using RDP with full graphics acceleration using the same tweaks. What the shinier VDI/Remote Desktop solutions like Sunshine+Moonlight, Parsec, Horizon, Citrix do for you is make all of this easier to set up and use. But as far as capability is concerned, RDP is quite powerful and quite capable, assuming you jump through the hoops to set it up right.