Overview

The Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) specification is a Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) passthrough hardware standard that regulates the device assignment. The PCI passthrough natively shares a single resource with multiple guests. PCI passthrough enables the virtual machines to bypass the hypervisor and virtual switch layer, and communicate directly with the PCI devices residing on the host. SR-IOV is an extension of the PCI passthrough specification. In the PCI configuration space, a single physical device that has SR-IOV capability enabled is virtualized as multiple devices. Each device is a secured and distinct unit with isolation at the resource level, which means it has its own set of storage and configurations. This mechanism provides data transfer at the near wire-speed along with low latency.

The SMI on Bare Metal platform supports both, PCF passthrough and the SR-IOV standards in the form of plugins. In the CNDP-KVM-UPF implementation, the VM and network devices are by default configured to support SR-IOV Virtual Functions (VFs). If you want to pass the network resources to network function (UPF) through the PCI passthrough standard, then enable the PCI passthrough for the network device.