R3 Test Document of IEC Type 5: SmartNIC for Integrated Edge Cloud (IEC) Blueprint Family

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.

Akarino 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

Traffic Generator

We will use DPDK pktgen as the Traffic Generator.

Test API description

<Akraino common tests>

The Test inputs

Test Procedure

Expected output

Test Results

<Blueprint extension tests>

The Test inputs

Test Procedure

Expected output

Test Results

<Feature Project Tests>

The Test inputs

Test Procedure

Expected output

Test Results

Test Dashboards

Single pane view of how the test score looks like for the Blue print.

Additional Testing

Bottlenecks/Errata