Performance

SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualisation) is a PCI-SIG specification that lets one physical PCIe device (typically a NIC or accelerator) expose multiple lightweight Virtual Functions (VFs) — each assignable directly to a VM or container — while a Physical Function (PF) remains for management and global configuration. VFs bypass much of the hypervisor’s software switching path, delivering lower latency, higher throughput, and more deterministic behaviour than paravirtualised virtio alone — properties valued in telco NFV (vEPC, vRAN CU/DU, firewall, DPI) and in cloud-native packet workloads on Kubernetes.

The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) is an open-source set of libraries and poll-mode drivers (PMDs) that move packet processing from the kernel to userspace, enabling telco and cloud applications to achieve millions of packets per second per core with predictable latency. DPDK bypasses the traditional socket stack: applications busy-poll NIC queues (or virtio/vhost rings), use hugepages to reduce TLB misses, and pin threads to NUMA-local cores — a model suited to UPF, vRouter, CG-NAT, load balancers, and 5G user-plane functions where per-packet syscall overhead is unacceptable.