this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
98 points (95.4% liked)

Selfhosted

40296 readers
322 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

For years I’ve had a dream of building a rack mounted PC capable of splitting its resources to host multiple GPU intensive VMs:

  • a few gaming VMs
  • a VM for work that can run Davinci Resolve and Blender renders
  • an LLM server
  • a Stable Diffusion server
  • media server

Just to name a few possibilities…

Everytime I’ve looked into it, it seemed like the technology just wasn’t there yet. I remember a few years ago Linus TT took a shot at it, but in the end suggested the technology (for non-commercial entities) just wasn’t in a comfortable spot yet.

So how far off are we? Obviously AI focused companies seem to make it work, but what possibilities exist for us self-hosters who might also want to run multiple displays in addition to the web gui LLM servers? And without forking out crazy money for GPU virtualization software licenses?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Byter@lemmy.one 10 points 5 months ago (6 children)

I've also wanted to do this for a while, but there were always a few too many barriers to actually spin up the project. Here's just a brain dump of things I've seen recently.

vGPUs continue to be behind a license. But there is now vgpu_unlock.

L1T just showed off PCIe "fabric" from Liqid that can switch physical devices between machines.

Turning VMs on and off isn't as slick as either of the above, but that is doable today. You'll just have to build all the switching automation yourself. That could just be a shell script running QEMU/libvirt commands, at a minimum.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Why are vGPUs behind a license? They work fine on Linux as they are part of KVM and Virtio.

[–] Byter@lemmy.one 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Why? Product segmentation I suppose. Last I looked, the Virtio project's efforts were still work-in-progress. The Arch wiki article corroborates that today. Inconsistent behavior across brands and product lines.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What are you talking about? I though we were talking about Proxmox

[–] Byter@lemmy.one 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The OP didn't mention Proxmox in their post. I've been speaking generally, not about any specific OS. For example, Nvidia's enterprise offerings include a license to use their "GRID" vGPU tech (and the enabled feature flag in the driver).

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)