Disclaimer: I'm at AWS, but not on the EC2 or networking teams, I'm not experienced with their stuff, and they'd be rightly upset if you took me as an authority

Disclaimer: I'm at AWS, but not on the EC2 or networking teams, I'm not experienced with their stuff, and they'd be rightly upset if you took me as an authority. That said, SR-IOV may obviate some or all of your concerns. The hypervisor is bypassed for most purposes, kinda like the way DPDK etc bypass the kernel. Microsoft has a nice diagram at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/network/overview-of-sr-iov-data-paths https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/ne...