Yes, any kernel >= 3.8 includes the relevant offload features. The improvements here primarily come from reduced overhead getting packets out of the VM (not men

Yes, any kernel >= 3.8 includes the relevant offload features. The improvements here primarily come from reduced overhead getting packets out of the VM (not mentioned in the post is that Andromeda 2.1 also eliminates VM exits when packets are sent and, where supported by Intel, when interrupts are delivered). edit: Realized you might have meant Linux VMs running outside of GCE -- the improvements here are fairly GCE-specific, although as wmf points out, vhost is a similar technology in the open source world. Performance specifics down at this level (tens of microseconds and below) tend to be hardware dependent.