Issue 11
© Solarflare Communications 2014
319
Solarflare Server Adapter
User Guide
Alternatively, virt-manager can be on another host and connect to the KVM host via “File”- >”Add
Connection”.
Creating an SR-IOV network
1
Select “Connection Details” from virt-manager’s “Edit” menu, and open the “Virtual
Networks” tab
2
Click the “+” button in the bottom-left to open the network creation wizard
3
Choose a name for your network
4
On the address space page, untick the “Create address space” button. On the next page the
“Enable
5
DHCP” button will be grayed out as it’s not applicable without an address space
6
On the next page, select “Forwarding to physical network”
7
In the “Destination” box, choose the “Phyiscal device X” that corresponds to the Solarflare
interface you wish to use
8
In the “Mode” box, select “Hybrid VF/macvtap”
Assigning an existing VM to an SR-IOV network
1
In the main virt-manager window, double-click the VM to manage it
2
Open the hardware tab by clicking the “(i)” button on the toolbar
3
Select the NIC you wish to use with SR-IOV from the list on the left
4
Update the “Source device” entry to use your SR-IOV network
Verifying SR-IOV
As described above, libvirt will manage VFs for interfaces with a new mode pci-passthrough-hybrid.
If there are spare VFs available when the VM is started then one (or more) VFs will be attached into
the running guest. If the guest OS has the Solarflare VF drivers, and the interface is a virtio interface,
then the virtio interface will be accelerated.
Once the VM has started, examine lspci to verify that a VF is present:
$ lspci
00:08.0 Ethernet controller: Solarflare Communications Device 1803
00:09.0 Ethernet controller: Solarflare Communications Device 1803
The interface is only accelerated once it’s brought up, after the interface is bought up USE dmesg TO
verify that a VF is accelerating a virtio adapter:
$ dmesg | grep –i xnap
xnap 0000:00:0a.0: accelerated eth2