The OP didn’t mention Proxmox in their post. I’ve been speaking generally, not about any specific OS. For example, Nvidia’s enterprise offerings include a license to use their “GRID” vGPU tech (and the enabled feature flag in the driver).

Why? Product segmentation I suppose. Last I looked, the Virtio project’s efforts were still work-in-progress. The Arch wiki article corroborates that today. Inconsistent behavior across brands and product lines.

I’ve also wanted to do this for a while, but there were always a few too many barriers to actually spin up the project. Here’s just a brain dump of things I’ve seen recently.

vGPUs continue to be behind a license. But there is now vgpu_unlock.

L1T just showed off PCIe “fabric” from Liqid that can switch physical devices between machines.

Turning VMs on and off isn’t as slick as either of the above, but that is doable today. You’ll just have to build all the switching automation yourself. That could just be a shell script running QEMU/libvirt commands, at a minimum.

I’d ask why they don’t make it optional (I’m not a Brave user) but it seems it was.

Another issue is that Strict mode is used by roughly 0.5% of Brave’s users, with the rest using the default setting, which is the Standard mode.

This low percentage actually makes these users more vulnerable to fingerprinting despite them using the more aggressive blocker, because they constitute a discernible subset of users standing out from the rest.

Given that, I’m inclined to agree with the decision to remove it. Pick your battles and live to fight another day.

They ask a bit of trust on that, but their FAQ also has an appeal to reason:

I have privacy concerns over linking my search queries with my credit card. Why should I trust you?

We do not log search queries. Queries you type are never associated with your account. The simple reason is we don’t have any reason to do so, as it would only be a liability for us. We are in the business of selling search results, not user data.

(For the record, I use Kagi)