Qemu can emulate the igb NICs which are capable of SR-IOV. This gives us the opportunity to enable the SR-IOV part of the https://opendev.org/openstack/whitebox-tempest-plugin to run in our UNI jobs that are using VMs as compute nodes. Such VMs can be defined to have igb SR-IOV capable NICs. [1]

This require multiple steps:

• Extend the CI framework to support customizing the domain XML of the virtual computes with igb NICs [2] and other necessary pieces like viommu and split apic [3].
• Reconfigure an uni job (e.g. beta) to
  • use the above CI framework functionality to get computes with SRI-OV NICs
  • configure and run tests from whitebox-tempest-plugin

Note, to enable all the SR-IOV testing requires multi NUMA node VMs which is also possible to emulate.

[1]https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/nova/+/928834/2/doc/source/contributor/testing/pci-passthrough-sriov.rst
[2]https://github.com/openstack-k8s-operators/ci-framework/blob/002b302d977e97af19b6d1ec94afbb36651456f6/roles/libvirt_manager/tasks/attach_interface.yml#L104
[3]https://github.com/openstack-k8s-operators/ci-framework/blob/002b302d977e97af19b6d1ec94afbb36651456f6/roles/libvirt_manager/templates/domain.xml.j2