Comment by matthewfcarlson
16 hours ago
As someone who worked on the M2 Mac Pro and has a real soft spot for it, I get it. It’s horrendously expensive and doesn’t offer much benefit over a Mac Studio and a thunderbolt pci chassis. My personal dream is that vms would support pci pass through and so you can just spin up a Linux vm and let it drive the gpus. But at that point, why are you buying a Mac?
Opinions are my own obvs.
> My personal dream is that vms would support pci pass through and so you can just spin up a Linux vm and let it drive the gpus.
SR-IOV is just that? and is well supported by both Windows and Linux.
SR-IOV and VFIO passthrough are different things. SR-IOV partitions a PCIe device across multiple VMs simultaneously (common for NICs and NVMe). VFIO passthrough gives one VM exclusive ownership of a physical device. For GPU compute you almost always want full passthrough, not SR-IOV partitioning.
The harder problem on Apple Silicon is that the M2 Ultra's GPU is integrated into the SoC -- it's not a discrete PCIe device you can isolate with an IOMMU group. Apple's Virtualization framework doesn't expose VFIO-equivalent hooks, so even if you add a discrete AMD Radeon to the Mac Pro's PCIe slots, there's no supported path to pass it through to a Linux guest right now.
On Intel Macs this actually worked via VFIO with the right IOMMU config. Apple Silicon VMs can do metal translation layers but that's not the same as bare-metal GPU access. It's a real limitation and I doubt Apple will prioritize solving it since it would undercut the "just use macOS" pitch.
Under a comment regarding the O2/Octane (both of which I own :) era, I first read “vms” as VMS, not multiple instances of a VM…
> Opinions are my own obvs.
Whose else would they be?
> as someone who worked on the m2 mac pro
They're trying to make it very clear they're not speaking on behalf of Apple Inc, despite having worked (or working) there.
Big companies like to give employees some minimal "media training", which mostly amounts to "do not speak for the company, do not say anything that might even slightly sound like you're speaking for the company".
An employer's, especially as they stated having worked (and perhaps still) at Apple in the same comment.
Oh, I interpreted it as “did work using a Mac Pro” vs helped develop the Mac Pro itself.
On the internet? Often the opinions of others they see getting upvotes.
>> Opinions are my own obvs.
> Whose else would they be?
takes a look at the user profile
Oh, they are a journalist/writer for a big name outfit
Maybe he was trying to say he isn’t a spokesman for anyone else :-)
do / did you have to always work in the office or do you get to work from home by taking a test rig with you ? always been curious about this