On Aug. 4 and 5, I attended APSys 2016, the

Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems. This episode is my own “industry

talk” from APSys, titled “Converging Approaches in Software Switches:

Combining code- and data-driven approaches to achieve a better result.”

Slides

from the talk are available and may provide a little extra insight, but

it is not necessary to view them to follow along with with the talk.

This talk introduces the idea that software switches can be broadly

divided in terms of their architecture into two categories:

“code-driven” switches that call a series of arbitrary functions on

each packet, and “data-driven” switches that use a single engine to

apply actions selected from a series of tables. This talk explains the

two models and the usefulness of the categorization, and explain how

hybrids of the two models can build on the strengths of both.

In the past, people have asked me to compare Open vSwitch to other

software switches, both architecture- and performance-wise. This talk is

the closest that I plan to come to a direct comparison. In it, I cover a

key architectural difference between Open vSwitch and most other software

switches, and I explain why that architectural difference makes a

difference for benchmarks that authors of many software switches like to

tout.

This talk includes a very kind introduction from Sorav Bansal, assistant

professor at IIT-Delhi, as well as several questions and answers

interleaved, including some from Sorav and some from others' whose names

I did not catch.

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.