AMD NPU virtualization

General Discussion
1

I was looking into trying the (crappy) NPU included in my AMD laptop, and it turns out that there is no support at this time for PCI passthrough of the device (just like with the iGPU, woe is me…).

It looks like there is a virtualization solution being worked on, at https://github.com/amd/virtio-npu.

I wonder if that is something that could be adapted to QubesOS. That would let user with available AMD NPUs to do locally accelerated AI even if they cannot pass-through their GPU (which in the case of laptops with just an iGPU can be tricky).

2

The repository you mentioned is under an excessively restrictive nonfree license. I reported this as a bug, as I suspect AMD incorrectly applied the license used for firmware. In general, it might be possible but is probably roughly as hard as GPU acceleration.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the insight!

I hope they fix their license, you have a good point about that.

I don’t know enough about virtualization, but it would seem that the repository is geared towards KVM, and it may not be directly applicable to Xen.

So patience may be required for this… :slight_smile: