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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 detailed will be provided in the future documentation.<Details about Additional tests required for this Blue Print in addition to the Akraino Validation Feature Project>

Akarino Test Group Information

<The Testing Ecosystem>

Testing Working Group Resources

Overall Test Architecture

Describe  To deploy the components of Test set up

We are interested in the benefits of hardware offloading provided by the SmartNIC, and the overall performance benefits for the Edge Cloud brought by the SmartNICs offload. 

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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.

Image Added

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

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Test Framework

Traffic Generator

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