High Availability
High availability (HA) is essential in network infrastructure to ensure continuous performance with minimal downtime, even during failures.
To support HA, the virtio-net-controller
process creates the auxiliary processes virtio-net-emu
and virtio-net-ha
. The virtio-net-emu
process handles primary controller functions, while virtio-net-ha
manages HA. virtio-net-ha
saves and oversees critical resources from virtio-net-emu
and restores it to a working state if a failure occurs. The two processes communicate through IPC messages.

High availability is only supported on BlueField-3 and after.
The following table provides possible expected behaviors:
Scenarios |
Behavior |
Downtime Per Device (sec) |
Fallback Action |
Virtio-net-emu process crashes (e.g., Segfault) |
The |
< 1 |
The |
Device/VQ/SF create/destroy failures |
HA makes sure the existing device is not affected |
N/A |
Retry or restart service |
DPA command timeout |
No action from HA; DPA is likely stuck |
N/A |
The |