CUDA/graphics in QEMU-KVM VMs without passing the Nvidia card to them
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Hi HN. I built this because I wanted a VM with a real GeForce GPU without losing the card on my desktop.It allows you to run CUDA and graphics in VMs without VFIO/vGPU by forwarding the NVIDIA driver's own ioctl surface from the guest to the host.That means stock libcuda and real Vulkan ICD run in the guest - no CUDA/Vulkan API remoting or translation. Display, LLM, CUDA, headless supported. Your desktop keeps using the same card, multiple VMs supported.Happy to go into the details of the architecture.
HN · launched Sep 8, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 87%) · 0 views
Niche: gpu infrastructure and developer tools · 129 launches, 7 in the last 7 days ▼ -30% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 129 launches in gpu infrastructure and developer tools →
Could you build this?
No Interception and forwarding of NVIDIA's proprietary ioctl syscall interface between guest and host VMs requires deep low-level kernel driver reverse-engineering and virtualization internals expertise.
What it would actually take: Requires developing custom guest and host kernel modules or userspace hypervisor extensions (QEMU device emulation) that proxy the undocumented NVIDIA UVM/RM ioctl surface and handle complex shared DMA/virtual memory mappings. The hard part is reverse engineering the closed NVIDIA driver protocol across driver versions to safely map GPU page tables and handle interrupts without crashing the host kernel. Demands senior systems engineers with virtualization (KVM/QEMU), Linux kernel module development, and GPU driver expertise.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: API remoting approaches, Translation-based solutions
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 287 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #263 of 288 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 314 days after the earliest competitor.
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