Table of Contents

Introduction

The R3 R4 release will evaluation the throughput and packet forwarding performance of the Mellanox BlueField SmartNIC cardevaluate the conntrack performance of Open vSwitch (OVS).

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 will compare the performance of an optimized software based OVS with the performance of the OVS running on a MLNX SmartNIC with hardware offload

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

Akraino Test Group Information

...

SmartNIC Test Architecture

We reuse the test architecture for smart NIC in R3 release. The below description is the same with the R3 release test documents.

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

...

OVS-DPDK Test Architecture

Test Bed

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

...