OVS Hardware Offload, with Simon Horman from Netronome

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.