NVIDIA Highlights Their Open-Source vGPU Upstreaming Work Built Atop Nova

The Rust-based NVIDIA Linux kernel driver "Nova" is set to take on an important role in the official NVIDIA Linux driver stack of the future. This mainline kernel driver continues seeing a flurry of activity to bring it into a usable state and eventually parity and beyond compared to the existing out-of-tree NVIDIA Linux driver code or the incomplete and largely reverse engineered Nouveau kernel driver. Presented at this week's KVM Forum was the current status of NVIDIA bringing vGPU support to the upstream kernel. Over the past year NVIDIA engineers have been working on bringing their Virtual GPU "vGPU" functionality to the Nova driver as part of getting this upstream Rust kernel driver ready for data center and cloud deployments. The NVIDIA vGPU support is nneeded for allowing a GPU to be split and shared between multiple VMs or containers. NVIDIA engineer Simon Song presented at the KVM Forum 2026 in Vancouver, Canada around the upstreaming efforts for NVIDIA vGPU support in the Linux kernel with Nova. Long story short, it's an ongoing effort and slowly taking shape. More of the NVIDIA vGPU enablement for Nova is expected to land for Linux 7.5. But other pieces remain and is looking like Linux 7.6+ before the kernel portion of the vGPU handling is all aligned. Over in user-space there are the vgpu-tools support tools being developed. Further out is building out vGPU live migration abilities, heterogeneous vGPU support, and other advanced functionality. Those interested can find the KVM Forum presentation embedded below. There is also the PDF slide deck on the session page.