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5.3. Device Assignment and SR-IOV

The following diagram demonstrates the involvement of the kernel in the Device Assignment and SR-IOV architectures.
Device assignment and SR-IOV

Figure 5.2. Device assignment and SR-IOV

Device assignment presents the entire device to the guest. SR-IOV needs support in drivers and hardware, including the NIC and the system board and allows multiple virtual devices to be created and passed into different guests. A vendor-specific driver is required in the guest, however, SR-IOV offers the lowest latency of any network option.