BOF: switchdev offloading

Session information has not yet been published for this event.

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BoF Track
60 Minute BoF
Scheduled: Thursday, August 20, 2015 from 5:00 – 6:00pm in Kirkland

One Line Summary

A look on the common dilemma for offloading Linux network component to HW switches and e-switches using switchdev

Abstract

The switch device driver model (switchdev) enables offloading of the forwarding plane from the kernel to the hardware tables, where the HW forwarding plane is viewed as a fast path cache of the Linux networking tables.
In this session, we discuss some issues that a vendor may face when implementing a switchdev offloading driver:
Offload policy options:
- Full synchronization (offload all)
- Traffic based (cache)
- LRU based
- Other?
How/should the application control the offload policy
Out Of Resource management:
What should be the behavior in case the HW resources exhausted?
- Ignore HW error and leave kernel and HW out of synched ? in that case, how do we synch the forwarding plane back again when HW resource become available ?
- Force full synchronization of kernel and HW tables i.e. delete the failed entry’s form the kernel as well?
- Provide some priority mechanism to replace “less important” entries with more important ones?
- How to implement a per table priority policy?

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Speaker

  • matty kadosh

    Biography

    software architect at Mellanox works on various networking components focusing on HW switches SDK and driver ,Linux, network protocols ,and SDN.