Open vSwitch: Hardware assisted filtering

This proposal has been accepted as a session.

*
Accepted Session
Network Virtualization I
Microconference Session

One Line Summary

Discussion around the use of hardware assisted filtering capabilities found in modern networking hardware to offload the filtering of packets to the hardware.

Abstract

The nature of Open vSwitch requires uplinks to be placed in promiscuous mode. The exposure to all traffic on the network requires the switch to process a lot of possibly non relevant network traffic. This severely limits the performance of the current Open vSwitch data path.

Use of modern filtering capabilities such as for example found in 82599 based chips can be used to establish hardware filters and drop packets of no interest at the network card level before the switch ever has to process it. The filtering capabilities can also be used to distribute packets across cores to better suit the needs of a virtual switch.

As a long term goal, the current Open vSwitch interface can become the standard API for any programmable eSwitch.

Tags

performance, virtualization, Open vSwitch, hardware filtering

Back to list of sessions

Speaker

Leave a private comment to organizers about this proposal