NVIDIA® BlueField® virtio-net enables users to create virtio-net PCIe devices in the system where the BlueField is connected. In a traditional virtualization environment, virtio-net devices can be emulated by QEMU from the hypervisor, or offloading part of the work (e.g., dataplane) to the NIC (e.g., vDPA). Compared to those solutions, virtio-net PCIe devices offload both data and control plane to the BlueField networking device. The PCIe virtio-net devices exposed to the hypervisor do not depend on QEMU or other software emulators/vendor drivers from the guest OS.
The solution is based on BlueField family technology on top of Virtual Switch and OVS, so that virtio-net devices can benefit from the full SDN and hardware offload methodologies.
Virtio-net-controller is a systemd service which runs the BlueField with a Command Line Interface (CLI) frontend to communicate with the service running in the background. The controller systemd service is enabled by default and runs automatically after certain firmware configurations are deployed. Please refer to “Virtio-net Deployment” for more information.
A separate process called virtio_net_manager is created to manage the Live Update process which does not interact with other virtnet CLI commands.
