Introduction

The R3 release will evaluation the throughput and packet forwarding performance of the Mellanox BlueField SmartNIC card.

A DPDK based Open vSwitch (OVS-DPDK) is used as the virtual switch, and the network traffic is virtualized with the VXLAN encapsulation.

Currently, the community version OVS-DPDK is considered experimental and not mature enough, it only supports "partial offload" which cannot

utilize the full performance advantage of Mellanox NICs. Thus the OVS-DPDK we used is a fork of the community Open vSwitch. We develop

our own offload code which enables the full hardware offload with DPDK rte_flow APIs. 

We have plans to open-source this OVS-DPDK. More details will be provided in future documentation.

Akraino Test Group Information

Overall Test Architecture

To deploy the Test architecture, we use a private Jenkins and an Intel server equipped with a BlueField v1 SmartNIC.

We use Ansible to automatically setup the filesystem image and install the OVS-DPDK in the SmartNICs.

The File Server is a simple Nginx based web server where stores the BF drivers, FS image.

The Git repo is our own git repo where hosts OVS-DPDK and DPDK code.

The Jenkins will use ansible plugin to download BF drivers and FS image in the test server and setup the environment

according to the ansible-playbook.

Test Bed

The testbed setup is shown in the above diagram. DUT stands for Device Under Test

Test Framework

The software used and the OVS-DPDK setup is shown below.

root@bluefield:/home/ovs-dpdk# ovs-vsctl show
2dccd148-526c-44a5-9351-67b04c5e2da4
    Bridge br-int
        datapath_type: netdev
        Port vxlan-vtp
            Interface vxlan-vtp
                type: vxlan
                options: {dst_port="4789", key=flow, local_ip="192.168.1.1", remote_ip=flow, tos=inherit}
        Port br-int
            Interface br-int
                type: internal
        Port pf1hpf
            Interface pf1hpf
                type: dpdk
                options: {dpdk-devargs="class=eth,mac=ae:d8:8a:c5:22:fb"}
    Bridge br-ex
        datapath_type: netdev
        Port br-ex
            Interface br-ex
                type: internal
        Port p1
            Interface p1
                type: dpdk
                options: {dpdk-devargs="class=eth,mac=98:03:9b:af:7b:0b"}

root@bluefield:/home/ovs-dpdk# ovs-vsctl list open_vswitch
_uuid               : 2dccd148-526c-44a5-9351-67b04c5e2da4
bridges             : [22334686-733a-445e-9130-a42009a3586e, 38af610d-01f7-497d-878b-c6b6a44abf6a]
cur_cfg             : 10
datapath_types      : [netdev, system]
datapaths           : {}
db_version          : []
dpdk_initialized    : true
dpdk_version        : "DPDK 19.11.0"
external_ids        : {}
iface_types         : [dpdk, dpdkr, dpdkvhostuser, dpdkvhostuserclient, erspan, geneve, gre, internal, ip6erspan, ip6gre, lisp, patch, stt, system, tap, vxlan]
manager_options     : []
next_cfg            : 10
other_config        : {dpdk-extra="-w 03:00.1,representor=[0,65535] --legacy-mem ", dpdk-init="true", hw-offload="true"}
ovs_version         : []
ssl                 : []
statistics          : {cpu="16", file_systems="/,13521220,3918464 /data,243823,2064 /boot,357176,61104", load_average="1.41,1.37,1.36", memory="16337652,5589928,1707640,0,0", process_ovs-vswitchd="5959388,256352,11515170,0,11484792,11484792,7", process_ovsdb-server="12620,6260,13190,0,68233832,68233832,6"}
system_type         : []
system_version      : []

Traffic Generator

We will use DPDK pktgen as the Traffic Generator.

Test API description

The test is to evaluate the performance of SmartNIC offloading.

Thus we currently don't have any Test APIs provided.

Test Dashboards 

Functional Tests

Open vSwitch itself contains a test suite for functional test, the link is http://docs.openvswitch.org/en/latest/topics/testing/

We have run the basic test suite according to the link. 

By running,

make check TESTSUITEFLAGS=-j8

We got the below results.

The two failed cases are about sFlow sampling. We are investigating the internal reason.

25 cases are skipped due to the configuration. 

Performance Tests

Single PF

Single PF, Single VF

Single PF, 4 VFs (only test with offloaded)

Additional Testing

n/a

Bottlenecks/Errata 

n/a