Approaches for Plumbing Hardware Accelerated Interfaces to Containerized Network Functions

There is strong interest in containerizing network functions to leverage the obvious advantages of containerization. Many network functions require user space access to layer 3 or layer 2 high speed i …

There is strong interest in containerizing network functions to leverage the obvious advantages of containerization. Many network functions require user space access to layer 3 or layer 2 high speed interfaces and bandwidth hungry network functions need zero copy access to the hardware offload features provided in modern 40GB and faster NICs. In this talk, Mr. Herbert will describe and contrast open source methods to plumb hardware accelerated interfaces into a containerized network function. He will discuss zero-copy methods such as SR/IOV and vDPA (vHost Data Path Acceleration.) and how vDPA shows promise as a vendor independent interface. He will also discuss vHost-user, tcflower and AF_XDP data paths and control paths. Finally, he will discuss how containers running in orchestration systems such as Kubernetes can utilize these interfaces.