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.

This patch series was sent out on Thursday by Red Hat's Jason Wang. This implements the vDPA bus for the Linux kernel as well as providing a vDPA device simulator and supporting vDPA-based transport within VirtIO.

This Red Hat blog post does a good job of describing vDPA. The highlights of vDPA are that it's a public specification, allows for wire-speed performance similar to SR-IOV, is a future proof design, offers transparent/robust protection, supports VM live migration, provides a standard accelerated interface for containers, and other benefits.

Check out that Red Hat blog post as well as their follow-up posts for more details on this latest work-in-progress Red Hat innovation around virtualization.