Is it RDMA? Is it a modification of SR-IOV?

I’m having trouble even trying to find out more about this since the RDMA definition just says “remote access to device memory” and I’d like to confirm if that includes virtual instances of PCIe devices over the network.

Essentially, I’m looking for a way to share virtual instances of supported PCIe devices over IP. I.e. If you have a GPU, you can create virtual slices of it with SR-IOV on KVM-based hypervisors. I’m looking for something that will take this and make it available over IP.

I have come across Infiniband and QLogic, Mellanox and HP and IBM and RDMA support on Debian and all of that. I just need someone to ELI5 this to me so I know where/what to search and see if what I want is really even possible with FOSS.

I know that Nutanix allows one to serve PCIe hardware over IP on their hypervisor, but I plan to stick with FOSS as far as possible.

Thanks!

Edit: Please let me know what makes my post so hard to grasp - the answer was simple RoCE/iWARP. RDMA is definitely the underlying technology that offers access to the memory of the device whilst bypassing the kernel for good performance; security considerations aside, this is a very good idea since RoCE/iWARP work on the UDP/IP and the TCP/IP stack, making them routable.

Apologies if my post didn’t make the most sense, I tried to describe it the best I could. Thanks

  • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    I’m fairly sure there’s a way to provide compatible PCIe devices over IP on a network, or “some network” (if you’re bypassing the IP stack, perhaps). I just don’t know what it’s called, and I’m getting more confused by whether RDMA support can do this or not. Essentially, I want to leverage what SR-IOV allows me to do (create virtual functions of eligible PCIe devices) and pass them over IP or some other network tech to VMs/CTs on a different physical host.