Offloading Network Traffic Classification to Hardware

In Networking, classifying packets consists in analysing the contentof the headers, and performing various actions based on it. It can be eitherdropping the packet, steering it to a dedicated receive …

In Networking, classifying packets consists in analysing the contentof the headers, and performing various actions based on it. It can be eitherdropping the packet, steering it to a dedicated receive ring, redirect it,perform throttling on the traffic flows, and so on.Offloading these operations in hardware isn’t new, and it can be done usingmultiple userspace interfaces : tc and ethtool.In this talk, we’ll see in details the different use-cases for classification,how to use it, and what’s the current state of hardware offload for classification.We’ll then dive a bit deeper into the hardware side, to see how this kind ofoffloading is typically implemented in hardware and how it’s configured, takingthe example of the mvpp2 driver which recently gained such support.We’ll finally see what’s the future for hardware offloading classification, withthe recent work to bring hardware offloading to netfilter and BPF.