r/chromeos • u/Aleksandr_Ulyev • 6h ago

Discussion Is it technically possible to use GPU in ChromeOS virtual machine?

I wonder if that is so. My laptop got decent hardware to run some older games, but the limitations of the VM bound me to play zero-to-no graphic games (drawn/animated). I know the VM can use CPU, RAM, disk space of the host, so can it use GPU the same way?

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u/GeneralEnvironment12 6h ago

You can't. The underlying OS doesn't allow.

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u/garrincha-zg 6h ago

grep -cw vmx /proc/cpuinfo

That's the command you'd use to check for nested virtualisation support. On my "super powerful" Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14, the answer is 0, which means it doesn't support it.

The Linux development environment on ChromeOS is a virtual machine in itself, but running a second VM inside it is a completely different matter. This requires specific hardware and kernel support that isn't yet standard, particularly on ARM-based Chromebooks like the ones with MediaTek Kompanio CPUs.

So, while it's technically possible on some high-end, modern Chromebooks, it's not a feature you can rely on across the board. The best bet for now is to stick to the built-in Linux environment for running desktop apps.

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u/lavilao 2h ago

do you mean igpu or dgpu? chromeos can use the main gpu of the system through virgl so gpu acceleration is possible (not on by default, a flag is needed) but passthrough the dgpu I dont know, there is a dgpu flag on crostini but dont know if it was implemented