PCI Device Access for VMs

You can provide VMs with PCI passthrough or SR-IOV access to network interface cards and other PCI devices.

Note

To use PCI passthrough or SR-IOV devices, you must have Intel-VTx and Intel VT-d features enabled in the BIOS.

Note

When starting a VM where interfaces have binding_vif_type, the following parameter is required for the VM flavor, hw:mem_page_size=large enabled

where, page size is one of the following:

• small: Requests the smallest available size on the compute node, which is always 4KiB of regular memory.

• large: Requests the largest available huge page size, 1GiB or 2MiB.

• any: Requests any available size, including small pages. StarlingX uses the largest available size, 1GiB, then 2MiB, and then 4KiB.

For a network interface card, you can provide VM access by configuring the network interface. For more information, see Configuring PCI Passthrough Ethernet Interfaces.

For other types of device, you can provide VM access by assigning a PCI alias to the device, and then referencing the PCI alias in a flavor extra specification. For more information, see Expose a Generic PCI Device for Use by VMs and Configuring a Flavor to Use a Generic PCI Device.

• PCI Passthrough Ethernet Interface Devices

• Configuring PCI Passthrough Ethernet Interfaces

• PCI SR-IOV Ethernet Interface Devices

• Generic PCI Passthrough

• SR-IOV Encryption Acceleration

• Expose a Generic PCI Device for Use by VMs

• Exposing a Generic PCI Device Using the CLI

• Configure a Flavor to Use a Generic PCI Device