NVIDIA Details Nova Driver vGPU Upstreaming Progress at KVM Forum, Targeting Linux 7.5/7.6
NVIDIA engineers presented the status of vGPU support in the Rust-based Nova driver at KVM Forum, with core features expected in Linux 7.5 and full alignment by 7.6+.
NVIDIA engineer Simon Song presented the latest upstreaming progress for virtual GPU (vGPU) support in "Nova," the company's Rust-based open-source Linux kernel driver, at the 2026 KVM Forum in Vancouver, Canada. vGPU technology allows a single physical GPU to be split and shared among multiple virtual machines or containers, a critical component for cloud and data center deployments.
According to Phoronix, the effort is ongoing. Some NVIDIA vGPU enablement code for Nova is expected to land in the Linux 7.5 kernel version, but other remaining pieces may require waiting until Linux 7.6 or later to achieve full alignment of the kernel portion of vGPU handling. User-space tools, specifically vgpu-tools, are also being developed concurrently.
More advanced functionalities such as vGPU live migration and heterogeneous vGPU support remain in earlier stages of construction. This progress marks NVIDIA's gradual migration of core virtualization capabilities from its proprietary driver stack to the mainline kernel, potentially reducing reliance on closed-source out-of-tree drivers.