SR-IOV on Ubuntu

Apr 122011

SR-IOV is a specification that allows a PCIe device to appear to be multiple separate physical PCIe devices.

Intel NICs for the server market – for example – advertise their SR-IOV capabilities to improve networking speed in virtualized guest systems. The network driver has to support SR-IOV and you can enable the capabilities by setting a parameter when loading the module using the modprobe command. For the driver igb, this is be max_vfs=7. More can be found in the Red Hat Virtualization Host Configuration and Guest Installation Guide (section on SR-IOV and the following section: 13.2. Using SR-IOV).

Intel NICs supporting SR-IOV include those based on the chipset Intel 82576 Gigabit Ethernet Controller
SR-IOV seems to work with 12.04 LTS as stated in this bug comment
little outdated but good resource: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/SR-IOV
A collection of references can to be found in the ubuntuforums.org forum post Anyone Using SR-IOV for KVM?.
Some practical questions are discussed in this Intel forum thread.
What is SR-IOV? http://blog.scottlowe.org/2009/12/02/what-is-sr-iov/

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