Documentation/networking/device_drivers/ethernet/microsoft/netvsc.rst

.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0

======================
Hyper-V network driver
======================

Compatibility
=============

This driver is compatible with Windows Server 2012 R2, 2016 and
Windows 10.

Features
========

Checksum offload
----------------
  The netvsc driver supports checksum offload as long as the
  Hyper-V host version does. Windows Server 2016 and Azure
  support checksum offload for TCP and UDP for both IPv4 and
  IPv6. Windows Server 2012 only supports checksum offload for TCP.

Receive Side Scaling
--------------------
  Hyper-V supports receive side scaling. For TCP & UDP, packets can
  be distributed among available queues based on IP address and port
  number.

  For TCP & UDP, we can switch hash level between L3 and L4 by ethtool
  command. TCP/UDP over IPv4 and v6 can be set differently. The default
  hash level is L4. We currently only allow switching TX hash level
  from within the guests.

  On Azure, fragmented UDP packets have high loss rate with L4
  hashing. Using L3 hashing is recommended in this case.

  For example, for UDP over IPv4 on eth0:

  To include UDP port numbers in hashing::

	ethtool -N eth0 rx-flow-hash udp4 sdfn

  To exclude UDP port numbers in hashing::

	ethtool -N eth0 rx-flow-hash udp4 sd

  To show UDP hash level::

	ethtool -n eth0 rx-flow-hash udp4

Generic Receive Offload, aka GRO
--------------------------------
  The driver supports GRO and it is enabled by default. GRO coalesces
  like packets and significantly reduces CPU usage under heavy Rx
  load.

Large Receive Offload (LRO), or Receive Side Coalescing (RSC)
-------------------------------------------------------------
  The driver supports LRO/RSC in the vSwitch feature. It reduces the per packet
  processing overhead by coalescing multiple TCP segments when possible. The
  feature is enabled by default on VMs running on Windows Server 2019 and
  later. It may be changed by ethtool command::

	ethtool -K eth0 lro on
	ethtool -K eth0 lro off

SR-IOV support
--------------
  Hyper-V supports SR-IOV as a hardware acceleration option. If SR-IOV
  is enabled in both the vSwitch and the guest configuration, then the
  Virtual Function (VF) device is passed to the guest as a PCI
  device. In this case, both a synthetic (netvsc) and VF device are
  visible in the guest OS and both NIC's have the same MAC address.

  The VF is enslaved by netvsc device.  The netvsc driver will transparently
  switch the data path to the VF when it is available and up.
  Network state (addresses, firewall, etc) should be applied only to the
  netvsc device; the slave device should not be accessed directly in
  most cases.  The exceptions are if some special queue discipline or
  flow direction is desired, these should be applied directly to the
  VF slave device.

Receive Buffer
--------------
  Packets are received into a receive area which is created when device
  is probed. The receive area is broken into MTU sized chunks and each may
  contain one or more packets. The number of receive sections may be changed
  via ethtool Rx ring parameters.

  There is a similar send buffer which is used to aggregate packets
  for sending.  The send area is broken into chunks, typically of 6144
  bytes, each of section may contain one or more packets. Small
  packets are usually transmitted via copy to the send buffer. However,
  if the buffer is temporarily exhausted, or the packet to be transmitted is
  an LSO packet, the driver will provide the host with pointers to the data
  from the SKB. This attempts to achieve a balance between the overhead of
  data copy and the impact of remapping VM memory to be accessible by the
  host.

XDP support
-----------
  XDP (eXpress Data Path) is a feature that runs eBPF bytecode at the early
  stage when packets arrive at a NIC card. The goal is to increase performance
  for packet processing, reducing the overhead of SKB allocation and other
  upper network layers.

  hv_netvsc supports XDP in native mode, and transparently sets the XDP
  program on the associated VF NIC as well.

  Setting / unsetting XDP program on synthetic NIC (netvsc) propagates to
  VF NIC automatically. Setting / unsetting XDP program on VF NIC directly
  is not recommended, also not propagated to synthetic NIC, and may be
  overwritten by setting of synthetic NIC.

  XDP program cannot run with LRO (RSC) enabled, so you need to disable LRO
  before running XDP::

	ethtool -K eth0 lro off

  XDP_REDIRECT action is not yet supported.