This is exactly what I'm referring to. You have a pool of virtual NICs on the host in user-space created by the VM runtime that get assigned to the guest on provision-time, which just passes through any commands/syscalls (bind/connect/etc.) via a funky driver interface. You'd have to mangle the guest kernel syscalls or libc though, it might be really ugly.

> You'd have to mangle the guest kernel syscalls or libc though, it might be really ugly.

You wouldn't have to. There's patches for hardware TCP offload using the normal socket syscall ABI. The kernel net stack maintainer is pretty ideologically against them so they're not mainlined, but plenty of people have been running them in production for decades and they're quite mature.

Oh neat!