In the past few posts we have discussed the existing virtio-networking architecture both the kernel based (vhost-net/virtio-net) and the userspace/DP

Achieving network wirespeed in an open standard manner: introducing vDPA

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2024-02-13 08:30:05

In the past few posts we have discussed the existing virtio-networking architecture both the kernel based (vhost-net/virtio-net) and the userspace/DPDK based (vhost-user/virtio-pmd). Now we'll turn our attention to emerging virtio-networking architectures aiming at providing wirespeed performance to VMs.

In this post we will be covering the building blocks for providing the desired data plane and control plane in order to achieve wire speed performance. We will cover the SR-IOV technology and how it currently addresses this problem. We will then describe virtio-networking approaches for addressing this challenge including virtio full HW offloading and vDPA (virtual data path acceleration) with an emphasis on the benefits vDPA brings. We will conclude by comparing the previous virtio-networking architectures and the ones presented here.

This post is intended for those who are interested in understanding the essence of the different virtio-networking architectures including vDPA without going into all the details (and there are a lot of details). As usual this post will be followed by a technical deep dive post and a hands on post.

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