What is SR-IOV?

SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) is a specification that allows a single Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) endpoint (typically a network card) to appear as multiple, separate physical devices. This enables virtualization environments to bypass the hypervisor for certain I/O operations, improving performance by providing near-native I/O speeds to virtual machines. It's commonly used in networking applications where low latency and high throughput are critical, such as high-performance computing, network function virtualization (NFV), and data centers.