GPU VIRTUALISATION

A method of GPU virtualization comprises allocating each virtual machine (or operating system running on a VM) an identifier by the hypervisor and then this identifier is used to tag every transaction deriving from a GPU workload operating within a given VM context (i.e. every GPU transaction on the system bus which interconnects the CPU, GPU and other peripherals). Additionally, dedicated portions of a memory resource (which may be GPU registers or RAM) are provided for each VM and while each VM can only see their allocated portion of the memory, a microprocessor within the GPU can see all of the memory. Access control is achieved using root memory management units which are configured by the hypervisor and which map guest physical addresses to actual memory addresses based on the identifier associated with the transaction.