I/O Virtualization (IOV) is a cornerstone of cloud computing, with container networking as a critical form of IOV in modern cloud paradigms. While container networks serve as feature-rich infrastructure, they incur a high CPU tax yet leave room for efficiency improvement. A natural idea is to offload container networks onto hardware such as SmartNICs via IOV interfaces. However, existing IOV mechanisms, such as SR-IOV, are misaligned with container requirements: limited device scalability versus high container density, packet-layer abstraction versus application-layer processing demands, and coarse-grained virtualization versus fine-grained container workloads.

Recent years have witnessed a wide adoption of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) to accelerate distributed systems. As the scale of distributed applications keeps increasing, network failures become more prominent. Although some link/switch failures can be circumvented by in-network rerouting, failures like NIC failure are still fatal in RDMA networks and may cause the entire system to fail.