Telcos and Cloud providers are looking for higher performance and scalability when building nextgen datacenters for NFV & SDN deployments. While running OVS over DPDK reduces the CPU overload of interrupt driven packet processing, CPU cores are still not completely freed up from polling of packet queues.
To solve this challenge, OVS-DPDK is further accelerated through HW offloads. We introduce a classification methodology that enables a split data plane between OVS-DPDK and the NIC hardware. A flow tag that represents the matched rule in the hardware is passed to OVS which saves CPU cycles consumed for flow look ups. We present the open source work being done in the DPDK, OVS and Linux Kernel communities and significant performance gains achieved. We also present how this work can be extended to VXLAN traffic.
