This patch series is the first step towards enabling hardware offloading of the L2 packet switching feature on virtio-net device to host machine. We are considering that this hardware offloading enables the use of high-performance networks in virtual infrastructures, such as container infrastructures on VMs.
To enable L2 packet switching by SR-IOV VFs, we are considering the following: - making the guest recognize virtio-net devices as SR-IOV PF devices (archived with this patch series) - allowing virtio-net devices to connect SR-IOV VFs to the backend networks, leaving the L2 packet switching feature to the management layer like libvirt - This makes hardware offloading of L2 packet switching possible. For example, when using vDPA devices, it allows the guest to utilize SR-IOV NIC embedded switch of hosts. This patch series aims to enable SR-IOV emulation on virtio-net devices. With this series, the guest can identify the virtio-net device as an SR-IOV PF device. The newly added property 'sriov_max_vfs' allows us to enable the SR-IOV feature on the virtio-net device. Currently, we are unable to specify the properties of a VF created from the guest. The properties are set to their default values. In the future, we plan to allow users to set the properties. qemu-system-x86_64 --device virtio-net,sriov_max_vfs=<num> # when 'sriov_max_vfs' is present, the SR-IOV feature will be automatically enabled # <num> means the max number of VF on guest Example commands to create VFs in virtio-net device from the guest: guest% readlink -f /sys/class/net/eth1/device /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/0000:01:00.0/virtio1 guest% echo "2" > /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/0000:01:00.0/sriov_numvfs guest% ip link show eth0: .... eth1: .... eth2: .... #virtual VF created eth3: .... #virtual VF created Please note that communication between VF and PF/VF is not possible by this patch series itself. Yui Washizu (1): virtio-pci: add SR-IOV capability hw/pci/msix.c | 8 +++-- hw/pci/pci.c | 4 +++ hw/virtio/virtio-pci.c | 62 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---- include/hw/virtio/virtio-pci.h | 1 + 4 files changed, 66 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-) -- 2.39.3