NIC SR-IOV APIs

Modern NICs are strongly encouraged to focus on implementing the switchdev model (see Ethernet switch device driver model (switchdev)) to configure forwarding and security of SR-IOV functionality.

Legacy API

The old SR-IOV API is implemented in rtnetlink Netlink family as part of the RTM_GETLINK and RTM_SETLINK commands. On the driver side it consists of a number of ndo_set_vf_* and ndo_get_vf_* callbacks.

Since the legacy APIs do not integrate well with the rest of the stack the API is considered frozen; no new functionality or extensions will be accepted. New drivers should not implement the uncommon callbacks; namely the following callbacks are off limits:

• ndo_get_vf_port

• ndo_set_vf_port

• ndo_set_vf_rss_query_en