Unable to bind SR-IOV VF or virtio NIC inside Virtual Machine using uio_pci_generic or vfio-pci to use DPDK application on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Issue

Unable to bind SR-IOV VF or virtio NIC inside Virtual Machine using uio_pci_generic or vfio-pci to use DPDK application on Red Hat Enterprise Linux before or equal to 7.4, independent of the underlying network that the VM uses (SR-IOV, OVS-DPDK, OVS kernel space).

A passthrough driver needs to be loaded for DPDK applications to run within instances. How can this be achieved?

One cannot use vfio-pci:

[root@sriov-vm ~]# driverctl set-override 0000:00:05.0 vfio-pci                                                                                                                               
driverctl: failed to bind device 0000:00:05.0 to driver vfio-pci
[root@sriov-vm dpdk]# driverctl list-overrides                                                                                                                                           
0000:00:05.0 (none)

One cannot use uio:

[root@sriov-vm dpdk]# driverctl set-override 0000:00:06.0 uio                                                                                                                           
driverctl: failed to bind device 0000:00:06.0 to driver uio
[root@sriov-vm dpdk]# driverctl list-overrides                                                                                                                                           
0000:00:06.0 (none)