low latency

Achieving high-performance, low-latency networking with XDP: Part I

Achieving high-performance, low-latency networking with XDP: Part I

pabeniredhat-com
By Paolo Abeni

XDP: From zero to 14 Mpps

In past years, the kernel community has been using different approaches in the quest for ever-increasing networking performance. While improvements have been measurable in several areas, a new wave of architecture-related security issues and related counter-measures has undone most of the gains, and purely in-kernel solutions for some packet-processing intensive workloads still lag behind the bypass solution, namely Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), by almost an order of magnitude.

But the kernel community never sleeps (almost literally) and the holy grail of kernel-based networking performance has been found under the name of XDP: the eXpress Data Path. XDP is available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, which you can download and run now.

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Open vSwitch-DPDK: How Much Hugepage Memory?

Open vSwitch-DPDK: How Much Hugepage Memory?

ktraynorredhat-com
By Kevin Traynor

Introduction

In order to maximize performance of the Open vSwitch DPDK datapath, it pre-allocates hugepage memory. As a user you are responsible for telling Open vSwitch how much hugepage memory to pre-allocate. The question of exactly what value to use often arises. The answer is, it depends.

There is no simple answer as it depends on things like the MTU size of the ports, the MTU differences between ports, and whether those ports are on the same NUMA node. Just to complicate things a bit more, there are multiple overheads, and alignment and rounding need to be accounted for at various places in OVS-DPDK. Everything clear? OK, you can stop reading then!
However, if not, read on.

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