SR-IOV — Single Root I/O Virtualization
Definition
A PCIe extension allowing a single physical I/O device (NIC, GPU, NVMe SSD) to present multiple virtual functions to virtual machines, each with direct hardware access.
Context & Usage
SR-IOV bypasses the hypervisor for I/O, giving VMs near-bare-metal network and storage performance. Each virtual function (VF) appears to the guest OS as a dedicated hardware device. Major use cases: high-performance VM networking (financial trading, NFV), GPU passthrough for AI workloads, and SmartNIC offload. Mellanox ConnectX-4/5/6 and Intel X710/E810 NICs support 32-256 VFs per port.
Examples
- Mellanox ConnectX-5 with 64 VFs serving 64 VMs
- NVIDIA A100 with 7 MIG instances using SR-IOV
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