On Tue, 4 May 2010 16:02:25 -0700
Pankaj Thakkar [off-list ref] wrote:

Device passthrough technology allows a guest to bypass the hypervisor and drive
the underlying physical device. VMware has been exploring various ways to
deliver this technology to users in a manner which is easy to adopt. In this
process we have prepared an architecture along with Intel - NPA (Network Plugin
Architecture). NPA allows the guest to use the virtualized NIC vmxnet3 to
passthrough to a number of physical NICs which support it. The document below
provides an overview of NPA.

We intend to upgrade the upstreamed vmxnet3 driver to implement NPA so that
Linux users can exploit the benefits provided by passthrough devices in a
seamless manner while retaining the benefits of virtualization. The document
below tries to answer most of the questions which we anticipated. Please let us
know your comments and queries.

Thank you.

Signed-off-by: Pankaj Thakkar <redacted>

Code please. Also, it has to work for all architectures not just VMware and
Intel.