OVS Hardware Offload, with Simon Horman from Netronome

OVS Orbit

Simon Horman has been an Open vSwitch contributor and committer since 2010. He currently works for Netronome, where his Open vSwitch work centers around hardware offload using the "tc" API integrated into the Linux kernel. This API allows users of Open vSwitch to transparently obtain better performance: when offload is enabled with a compatible network card, Open vSwitch works the same way, but faster.

The conversation includes:

• Categories of NICs with hardware offload
• The architecture of Netronome NICs
• How the offload API works
• Handling state (such as connection tracking state) in hardware offload
• Limitations of hardware offload, such as memory and other resource limits
• Extending hardware offload to DPDK
• The possibility of classification-only offload
• Offload interaction with the OVS caching hierarchy
• The cost of offload
• Kernel politics of the offload API
• Applications for offload
• Vendor cooperation across the API

Simon Horman is available on Twitter as @horms.

For more information on the offload API, you might want to listen to Episode 50, with Andy Gospodarek from Broadcom.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The intro music in this episode is Drive, featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper music is Yeah Ant featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro music is Space Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.