Learn about virtio-networking

What is virtio-networking?

Put simply, virtio-networking is the networking device of virtio, a standardized open interface for virtual machines (VMs) to access simplified devices such as block storage and networking adaptors.

While the virtio networking device was originally developed as a network virtualization interface between physical hosts and guests in virtual environments, a number of open source communities have adopted this networking device as a means of addressing emerging networking challenges.

The Linux Kernel community, the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) community, QEMU and OASIS among others all lean on these specifications, broadly forming the virtio-networking community.

Virtio-networking blog series

This is the third series of virtio-networking blog posts. You can find the first and second series here:

• Virtio-networking series

• Virtio-networking: Advanced topics

Running containerized workloads with virtio/vDPA

April 11, 2023 - Leonardo Milleri, Ariel Adam

In this article we will focus on the work being done to integrate virtio/vDPA into Kubernetes as the primary interface for pods. This solution is part of a larger approach of offloading the networking from the host to the network interface card (NIC)...read full post

Hyperscale virtio/vDPA introduction: One control plane to rule them all

April 14, 2022 - Jason Wang, Ariel Adam

Hyperscale is a use case where storage, networking and security are offloaded to smartNICs (programmable accelerators) to free up the host server's resources to run workloads such...read full post

Hardening Virtio for emerging security use cases

June 16, 2022 - Jason Wang, Ariel Adam

In this article we present a high-level overview of work currently being done in virtio/vDPA to support the emerging threats, including actual use cases. We also provide some insig...read full post

Introducing VDUSE: a software-defined datapath for virtio

July 14, 2022 - YongJi Xie, Jason Wang

vDPA device in userspace (VDUSE) is an emerging approach for providing software-defined storage and networking services to virtual machine (VM) and container workloads....read full post

Virtio-net failover: An introduction

July 25, 2022 - Laurent Vivier

Virtio-net failover is a virtualization technology that allows a virtual machine (VM) to switch from a Virtual Function I/O (VFIO) device to a virtio-net device when the VM needs...read full post

Hands on vDPA: what do you do when you ain't got the hardware v2 (Part 1)

August 9, 2022 - Cindy Lu, Jason Wang

In this article we explain the different vDPA software simulators, and provide detailed instruction for hands-on use cases you can try out...read full post

Hands on vDPA: what do you do when you ain't got the hardware v2 (Part 2)

August 16, 2022 - Cindy Lu, Jason Wang

The vp_vpda is a vDPA driver for a virtio-pci device which bridges between a vDPA bus and virtio-pci device. It’s especially useful for future feature prototyping and testing...read full post

Accelerate containers and VMs networking with vDPA

This video introduces vDPA (virtual datapath acceleration) and full virtio HW offloading intended on providing wirespeed/wirelatency L2 interface to containers and VMs. Such interfaces are desired for NFV use cases (VNFs/CNFs) and for enterprise use cases as well.

Virtual Versus Physical: Virtio Changes for New Hardware

This video discusses changes in the Virtio specification for the benefit of new CPU and offload hardware: some of them already accepted for the next specification version, some still under discussion.

vDPA Support in Linux Kernel

vDPA: on the road to production

This video introduces Virtio Datapath Acceleration (vDPA) technology, gives a high level overview of both DPDK and Kernel alternatives, and provides an update on the Virtio-user PMD driver. The presenters also give an overview of the higher-level picture, presenting work being done with the Kubernetes community to provide vDPA interfaces to containers.

Bringing vDPA to Life in Kubernetes

This video reviews vDPA (Virtio Datapath Acceleration) technology intended to provide wirespeed/wirelatency L2 network interfaces to pods building on the virtio open standard data plane.

DPDK on K8s Demo