
Issue 11
© Solarflare Communications 2014
307
Solarflare Server Adapter
User Guide
Chapter 7: SR-IOV Virtualization Using KVM
This chapter describes Solarflare’s unified approach to SR-IOV Virtualization using Linux KVM and
identifies supported KVM guests. Solarflare SR-IOV enables accelerated cut-through performance
while maintaining full compatibility with hypervisor based services and management tools.
• Supported Platforms and Adapters...Page 307
• Configuration Red Hat 6.1 on page 314
• Configuration Red Hat 6.2 on page 317
• Performance Tuning...Page 320
7.1 Supported Platforms and Adapters
Solarflare KVM SR-IOV acceleration currently supports:
Host
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0, 6.1 and 6.2 KVM
Guest VM
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5, 5.6 and 5.7
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0, 6.1 and 6.2
Adapters
• All Solarflare SFN5xxx and SFN6xxx series adapters. Solarflare adapters support 127 VFs per port
and 1024 vNICs each with a dedicated MSI-X interrupt.
Acceleration of guest VMs running other (non-Linux) operating systems is not currently supported
although Solarflare are considering accelerating Windows guests in the longer term.
The hardware supports different configurations of (a) the number VFs exposed and (b) the number
of vNICs (and therefore MSI-X interrupts) to give to each VF. This can be configured with the sfboot
utility.
Currently the default configuration is 127 VFs each allocated 1 vNIC.