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 [1]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.



[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/bb783b7b-80d8-4779-a8a4-ad495dd9948c@intel.com/T/