Running Containerized Workloads With Virtio/VDPA
Red Hat News, April 11th, 2023
In previous articles, we have introduced vDPA (Virtual Data Path Acceleration) which replaces existing closed and proprietary SR-IOV interface with open and standard virtio interfaces for the purpose of packet steering (as opposed to packet processing).
When we say vDPA we actually mean virtio/vDPA where virtio is used for the data plane while vDPA focuses on the control plane. vDPA is basically a kernel shim layer translating the vendor specific control plane to a virtio control plane and simplifying the work for the NIC vendor adoption. In this context, it's also important to point out that some NIC vendors implement virtio full hardware (HW) offloading where both the data plane and control plane are implemented in the NIC and are fully virtio-compliant. In that case, there is no need for the vDPA shim layer to translate the control plane.