Chapter 16. SR-IOV

The PCI-SIG (PCI Special Interest Group) developed the Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) specification. The PCI-SIG Single Root IOV specification is a standard for a type of PCI passthrough which natively shares a single device to multiple guests. SR-IOV does not require hypervisor involvement in data transfer and management by providing an independent memory space, interrupts, and DMA streams for guests.

SR-IOV enables a Single Root Function (for example, a single Ethernet port), to appear as multiple, separate, physical devices. A physical device with SR-IOV capabilities can be configured to appear in the PCI configuration space as multiple functions, each device has its own configuration space complete with Base Address Registers (BARs).

SR-IOV uses two new PCI functions:

The hypervisor can map one or more Virtual Functions to a guest. The Virtual Function's configuration space is mapped, by the hypervisor, to the guest's configuration space.

Each Virtual Function can only be mapped once as Virtual Functions require real hardware. A guest can have multiple Virtual Functions. A Virtual Function appears as a network card in the same way as a normal network card would appear to an operating system.

The SR-IOV drivers are implemented in the kernel. The core implementation is contained in the PCI subsystem, but there must also be driver support for both the Physical Function (PF) and Virtual Function (VF) devices. With an SR-IOV capable device one can allocate VFs from a PF. The VFs appear as PCI devices which are backed on the physical PCI device by resources (queues, and register sets).

Virtual Functions have near-native performance and provide better performance than para-virtualized drivers and emulated access. Virtual Functions provide data protection between guests on the same physical server as the data is managed and controlled by the hardware.

These features allow for increased guest density on hosts within a data center.