Efficient fine grained processing of graphics workloads in a virtualized environment

Abstract

An apparatus and method are described for fine grained sharing of graphics processing resources for example, one embodiment of a graphics processing apparatus comprises: a plurality of command buffers to store work elements from a plurality of virtual machines or applications, each work element indicating a command to be processed by graphics hardware and data identifying the virtual machine or application which generated the work element; a plurality of doorbell registers or memory regions, each doorbell register or memory region associated with a particular virtual machine or application, a virtual machine or application to store an indication in its doorbell register or memory region when it has stored a work element to a command buffer; and a work scheduler to read a work element from a command buffer responsive to detecting an indication in a doorbell register, the work scheduler to combine work elements from multiple virtual machines or applications in a submission to a graphics engine, the graphics engine to execute a work element using the data identifying a virtual machine or application associated with the work element, wherein different graphics engines are configured to simultaneously execute workloads belonging to different virtual machines or applications.