[functional_dev]

this made me look into how cloud hypervisors actually work on HW level.. they all offload it to custom HW (smart nic, fpga, dpu, etc..). cpu does almost nothing except for tenant work. AWS -> Nitro, Azure -> FPGA, NVIDIA sells DPUs.

Here is interactive visual guide if anyone wants to explore - https://vectree.io/c/cloud-virtualization-hardware-nitro-cat...

[axelriet]

VM management does not run on the FPGA; it’s regular Win32 software on Windows, with aspirations to run some equivalent, someday, on the SoC next to the FPGA on the NIC. The programmable hardware is used for network paths and PCIe functions, where it can project NICs and NVMe devices to VMs to bypass software-based, VMBus-backed virtual devices, all of which end up being serviced on the host who controls the real hardware. Lookup SR-IOV for the bypass. So yes, that’s I/O bypass/offload, but the VM management stack offload is a distinct thing that does not require an FPGA, just a SoC.