--- features: - | The libvirt driver has added support for hardware-offloaded OVS with vDPA (vhost Data Path Acceleration) type interfaces. vDPA allows virtio net interfaces to be presented to the guest while the datapath can be offloaded to a software or hardware implementation. This enables high performance networking with the portablity of standard virtio interfaces. issues: - | Nova currently does not support the following lifecycle operations when combined with a instance using vDPA ports: shelve, resize, cold migration, live migration, evacuate, suspend or interface attach/detach. Attempting to use one of the above operations will result in a HTTP 409 (Conflict) error. While some operations like "resize to same host", shelve or attach interface technically work, they have been blocked since unshelve and detach interface currently do not. Resize to a different host has been blocked since its untested, evacuate has also been blocked for the same reason. These limitation may be removed in the future as testing is improved. Live migration is currently not supported with vDPA interfaces by QEMU and therefore cannot be enabled in openstack at this time. Like SR-IOV, vDPA leverages DMA transfer between the guest and hardware. This requires the DMA buffers to be locked in memory. As the DMA buffers are allocated by the guest and can be allocated anywhere in the guest RAM, QEMU locks **all** guest RAM. By default the ``RLIMIT_MEMLOCK`` for a normal QEMU instance is set to 0 and qemu is not allowed to lock guest memory. In the case of SR-IOV, libvirt automatically set the limit to guest RAM + 1G which enables QEMU to lock the memory. This does not happen today with vDPA ports. As a result if you use VDPA ports without enabling locking of the guest memory you will get DMA errors. To workaround this issues until libvirt is updated, you must set ``hw:cpu_realtime=yes`` and define a valid ``CPU-REALTIME-MASK`` e.g ``hw:cpu_realtime_mask=^0`` or define ``hw:emulator_threads_policy=share|isolate``. Note that since we are just using ``hw:cpu_realtime`` for its side-effect of locking the guest memory, this usage does not require the guest or host to use realtime kernels. However, all other requirements of ``hw:cpu_realtime`` such as requiring hw:cpu_policy=dedicated still apply. It is also strongly recommended that hugpages be enabled for all instances with locked memory. This can be done by setting ``hw:mem_page_size``. This will enable nova to correctly account for the fact that the memory is unswapable.