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Comment by polskibus | Hacker News Reader

Is this improvement also available in standard Linux? If not, can it be ported to benefit all Linux VMs?

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.

It sounds like this feature is akin to vhost which has been available in Linux for a few years. Using vhost-net and OVS or vhost-user and VPP you could build something similar to Andromeda.

It's similar, although distinct. By building on a common foundation of Google networking dataplane bits, Jake's team (and peer teams) get easier integration with Google's other networking infrastructure for features like DoS protection, encryption, etc. The core bits underlying Andromeda 2.1 are related to those used for Espresso (https://www.blog.google/topics/google-cloud/making-google-cl... — HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14037830).

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