[userbinator]

From your first one:

Malicious Driver Detection

My reaction upon reading that line was "WTF." I haven't touched NIC drivers beyond the classic NE2000s, common Realteks, and the Intel 8254x, but it seems strange to have some sort of... antimalware feature in a NIC? Reminds me of the old BIOSes with "boot sector antivirus".

[rzezeski]

Probably more to do with the fact that everything is moving towards virtualization. Oftentimes these NICs dole out VFs directly to VMs via SR-IOV, in which case I imagine the NIC controller has some safeguards to keep the host and the rest of the guest's safe from denial-of-service and other attacks from a malicious guest driver.