Session

DPUs, or data processing units, are a new class of programmable processors joining CPUs and GPUs as one of the three pillars of computing. Among the many benefits of DPUs are offloading network processing and management from the main CPU, providing security isolation and virtualizing storage.

E-VPN is a network virtualization technology for the data center. It uses a BGP based distributed network virtualization control plane and is capable of working with several dataplanes.

In this paper we present deploying a Linux implementation of E-VPN on the DPU and its benefits towards building a more resilient L3 network fabric for the data center. Linux E-VPN implementation uses FRR’s (Free Range Routing) BGP E-VPN control plane with Linux kernel routing, bridging and VxLAN for its data plane.

In previous talks here at netdev we have covered various aspects of accelerating Linux networking (routing, bridging and vxlan) with switchdev infrastructure and netlink based hardware accelerators. Here we demonstrate our work on accelerating a Linux networking E-VPN dataplane using a netlink based hardware accelerator. This netlink to hardware flow programming translator can in turn use hardware flow programming interfaces like TC or dpdk. We will demonstrate mapping of Linux kernel E-VPN data plane constructs to flow tables and features like underlay ecmp mapping to achieve fast failover during uplink failures.