The Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) technology provides the ability to partition a single physical PCI resource device into virtual PCI functions (VFs) which can then be injected into a VM and/or Kubernetes pod. In the case of network VFs, SR-IOV improves north-south network performance by allowing traffic to bypass the host machine’s network stack.
The SR-IOV network device plugin discovers and registers available SR-IOV capable VFs in host machine to Kubernetes API as extended resources. Pods that require one or more SR-IOV VFs will request for these VFs in their specification. Kubelet takes care of resource allocation and accounting of all VFs that registered with the SR-IOV network device plugin.
This role deploys the SR-IOV Network Device Plugin in Kubernetes.