Open Stack

Hi, all,

just to add to the discussion, at CERN we have recently deployed a bunch 
of A100 GPUs in PCI passthrough mode, and are now looking into improving 
their usage by using MIG. From the NOVA point of view things seem to 
work OK, we can schedule VMs requesting a VGPU, the client starts up and 
gets a license token from our NVIDIA license server (distributing 
license keys is our private cloud is relatively easy in our case). It's 
a PoC only for the time being, and we're not ready to put that forward 
as we're facing issues with CUDA on the client (it fails immediately in 
memory operations with 'not supported', still investigating why this 
happens).

Once we get that working it would be nice to be able to have a more fine 
grained scheduling so that people can ask for MIG devices of different 
size. The other challenge is how to set limits on GPU resources. Once 
the above issues have been sorted out we may want to look into cyborg as 
well thus we are quite interested in first experiences with this.

Kind regards,

Ulrich

On 13.01.23 21:06, Dmitriy Rabotyagov wrote:
> To have that said, deb/rpm packages they are providing doesn't help 
> much, as:
> * There is no repo for them, so you need to download them manually 
> from enterprise portal
> * They can't be upgraded anyway, as driver version is part of the 
> package name. And each package conflicts with any another one. So you 
> need to explicitly remove old package and only then install new one. 
> And yes, you must stop all VMs before upgrading driver and no, you 
> can't live migrate GPU mdev devices due to that now being implemented 
> in qemu. So deb/rpm/generic driver doesn't matter at the end tbh.
>
>
> пт, 13 янв. 2023 г., 20:56 Cedric <yipikai7 at gmail.com>:
>
>
>     Ended up with the very same conclusions than Dimitry regarding the
>     use of Nvidia Vgrid for the VGPU use case with Nova, it works
>     pretty well but:
>
>     - respecting the licensing model as operationnal constraints, note
>     that guests need to reach a license server in order to get a token
>     (could be via the Nvidia SaaS service or on-prem)
>     - drivers for both guest and hypervisor are not easy to implement
>     and maintain on large scale. A year ago, hypervisors drivers were
>     not packaged to Debian/Ubuntu, but builded though a bash script,
>     thus requiering additional automatisation work and careful
>     attention regarding kernel update/reboot of Nova hypervisors.
>
>     Cheers
>
>
>     On Fri, Jan 13, 2023 at 4:21 PM Dmitriy Rabotyagov
>     <noonedeadpunk at gmail.com> wrote:
>     >
>     > You are saying that, like Nvidia GRID drivers are open-sourced while
>     > in fact they're super far from being that. In order to download
>     > drivers not only for hypervisors, but also for guest VMs you need to
>     > have an account in their Enterprise Portal. It took me roughly 6
>     weeks
>     > of discussions with hardware vendors and Nvidia support to get a
>     > proper account there. And that happened only after applying for
>     their
>     > Partner Network (NPN).
>     > That still doesn't solve the issue of how to provide drivers to
>     > guests, except pre-build a series of images with these drivers
>     > pre-installed (we ended up with making a DIB element for that [1]).
>     > Not saying about the need to distribute license tokens for
>     guests and
>     > the whole mess with compatibility between hypervisor and guest
>     drivers
>     > (as guest driver can't be newer then host one, and HVs can't be too
>     > new either).
>     >
>     > It's not that I'm protecting AMD, but just saying that Nvidia is not
>     > that straightforward either, and at least on paper AMD vGPUs look
>     > easier both for operators and end-users.
>     >
>     > [1] https://github.com/citynetwork/dib-elements/tree/main/nvgrid
>     >
>     > >
>     > > As for AMD cards, AMD stated that some of their MI series card
>     supports SR-IOV for vGPUs. However, those drivers are never open
>     source or provided closed source to public, only large cloud
>     providers are able to get them. So I don't really recommend
>     getting AMD cards for vGPU unless you are able to get support from
>     them.
>     > >
>     >
>
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