Red Hat Shows Off Their vDPA Kernel Patches For Better Ethernet Within VMs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Red Hat Shows Off Their vDPA Kernel Patches For Better Ethernet Within VMs

Red Hat engineers have been developing virtual data path acceleration (vDPA) as a standard data plane that is more flexible than VirtIO full hardware offloading. The goal is providing wire-speed Ethernet interfaces to virtual machines in an open manner...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Red-Hat-vDPA-Patches

[milkylainen]

To me, wire-speed Ethernet in a VM sounds more like a buzzword than anything else.
If a MAC + drivers can't sustain full speed low packet size framing physically, how will the VM do it?
A 10G interface is ~15Mpps at min packet size.

[CommunityMember]

If a MAC + drivers can't sustain full speed low packet size framing physically, how will the VM do it?
A 10G interface is ~15Mpps at min packet size.

Most modern server ethernet devices support some sort of packet processing offload/Interrupt coalescing capability to reduce the royal overheads to something mostly achievable with modern servers for normal traffic mix. Those that require full stack processing of packets every 66 ns will use different solutions.

[pal666]

If a MAC + drivers can't sustain full speed low packet size framing physically, how will the VM do it?

they can sustain on capable cpu