At the time Andromeda was originally introduced it took a fairly recent Linux kernel to get support for multi-queue networking and offloads with virtio-net. Tod

At the time Andromeda was originally introduced it took a fairly recent Linux kernel to get support for multi-queue networking and offloads with virtio-net. Today anything even moderately recent has support baked in -- specifically Linux 3.8 and above include multi-queue support (as well as the offloads we support). In terms of specific offloads, the big ones are TCP segmentation offload (TSO) and TCP large receive offload (LRO). These substantially reduce the compute burden on the guest. Less impactful (although still important) are checksum calculation and verification offload. (I was the tech lead for the hypervisor side of this launch — Jake, the post's author, leads the fast-path team for the Andromeda software switch)