[LightDestory]

Error 43

YEP... if you own a NVIDIA GPU and you use Virtual Machines it is very probably that you meet this error. If not, don't worry I will explain what it mean.

Do you know what is a virtual machine? No?
Well, you can think about as a sandbox, you can run a Operation System inside that sandbox and do whatever you want, like dangerous experiements without damaging your real Operation System. IT PROTECTS YOUR OPERATION SYSTEM, NOT YOU. IF YOU DO SOMETHING DANGEROUS/ILLEGAL INSIDE A VIRTUAL MACHINE... YOU ARE STILL TRACKABLE.

So let's immagine you are running a virtual machine, for this example you have a Linux Machine and you are running a Windows VM, and you want to do a GPU-intensive workload such as gaming (Linux Host that doesn't work well with wine) or video rendering (using specific software such as Premiere PRo).

You will soon discover that you can passthrough your GPU, while installing the NVIDIA drivers or on device manager you will see the "Error 43" and the gpu-device shutdown. What doesn't mean passthrough? Well, you are linking your GPU to the VM so it can use the video card full power.

NVIDIA on the past introduced a check on their CONSUMER products to block this features because they wanted it exclusively for their enterprise cards such as QUADRO.

BUT: Recently NVIDIA announced the enabling of this feature again on our consumer cards on the newest beta drivers!

NVIDIA BLESSING
Should we be happy? I mean this feature was already there and blocked at once on the past... so we are just receiving back what we had.

What do you think?

[Sn1F3rt]

Error 43

YEP... if you own a NVIDIA GPU and you use Virtual Machines it is very probably that you meet this error. If not, don't worry I will explain what it mean.

Do you know what is a virtual machine? No?
Well, you can think about as a sandbox, you can run a Operation System inside that sandbox and do whatever you want, like dangerous experiements without damaging your real Operation System. IT PROTECTS YOUR OPERATION SYSTEM, NOT YOU. IF YOU DO SOMETHING DANGEROUS/ILLEGAL INSIDE A VIRTUAL MACHINE... YOU ARE STILL TRACKABLE.

So let's immagine you are running a virtual machine, for this example you have a Linux Machine and you are running a Windows VM, and you want to do a GPU-intensive workload such as gaming (Linux Host that doesn't work well with wine) or video rendering (using specific software such as Premiere PRo).

You will soon discover that you can passthrough your GPU, while installing the NVIDIA drivers or on device manager you will see the "Error 43" and the gpu-device shutdown. What doesn't mean passthrough? Well, you are linking your GPU to the VM so it can use the video card full power.

NVIDIA on the past introduced a check on their CONSUMER products to block this features because they wanted it exclusively for their enterprise cards such as QUADRO.

BUT: Recently NVIDIA announced the enabling of this feature again on our consumer cards on the newest beta drivers!

NVIDIA BLESSING
Should we be happy? I mean this feature was already there and blocked at once on the past... so we are just receiving back what we had.

What do you think?

I think yes we should be happy, in fact, I'm quite neutral. It's good that Nvidia brought this feature back. If I use VMs I'd definitely want my GPU power to be used inside of the container if I do need it that is. I wasn't aware of this to date, thanks to you I got to know of this. I run Docker containers on my PC which host Linux VMs, so they are mainly SSH controlled, therefore I never really installed a GUI. Even then, it's good to know of this so that I wouldn't have to run around if I would encounter the error. I'll update the drivers too. Thanks for the heads up.

[LightDestory]

I think yes we should be happy, in fact, I'm quite neutral. It's good that Nvidia brought this feature back. If I use VMs I'd definitely want my GPU power to be used inside of the container if I do need it that is. I wasn't aware of this to date, thanks to you I got to know of this. I run Docker containers on my PC which host Linux VMs, so they are mainly SSH controlled, therefore I never really installed a GUI. Even then, it's good to know of this so that I wouldn't have to run around if I would encounter the error. I'll update the drivers too. Thanks for the heads up.

GPU passthrough is a common use on VM that does calculations, you can think about render farms, scientific calculations. These places are ruled by AMD GPUs becayse they don't block such features on consumer hardware :=)

It is nice to see that we can again do such activities with Nvidia without the need to by a QUADRO. I am stilla bit mad because we had this feature on the past..