Howard is an IT standards engineer at Huawei. He has been working on

open source for about 6 years and attended the early Open vSwitch

conferences, including the earliest one held at Cisco in 2014. In this

episode of OVS Orbit, Howard talks about the OpenStack Cyborg project in

OpenStack, which was formerly called Nomad. Howard is the “caretaking”

PTL for the project.

The Cyborg project supports all kinds of hardware acceleration for

OpenStack. It spans networking, storage, and other areas, primarily

because users tend to think of acceleration as a single bucket of

features. Acceleration features across these multiple areas do require

common lifecycle management processes, supplied by Cyborg as as a common

management framework.

Open vSwitch relates to Cyborg on the network acceleration angle. Howard

says that OVS can benefit from lifecycle management for hardware

acceleration, especially when the DPDK datapath is involved. This could

allow users to ensure that OVS is always properly configured for the

local hardware. Even in the absence of special acceleration hardware,

DPDK requires NIC- and CPU-specific configuration and tuning that amounts

to a kind of software acceleration, which Cyborg can help to manage.

Howard says that the project is planning an initial release for September

2017, in time for the OpenStack developer meeting.

The Cyborg website

and master

slide deck are good basic resources for learning about Cyborg.

You can contact or follow Howard on Twitter as @nopainkiller.

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.