BoFs

There is an increasing demand for languages and tools to describe datapath processing from userspace policy. This includes packet parsing, mangling, lookups and forwarding actions. This BoF will collect the experience of ongoing efforts from different fronts to resolve this problem in the Linux networking area.

This BoF is not about the amazing performance improvements we have completed over the last year. This BoF is about existing bottlenecks observed in the kernel network-stack, and how to tackle these.

It is a forum where we discuss how to address and tackle these existing bottlenecks.

We call for speakers, wanting to share their observations and who seek input from the community and the kernel network developers present at this conference.

The switchdev project in the Linux Kernel has come a long way in preserving the Linux networking API across devices with differing capabilities. It has provided a path to unify networking configuration across all devices running Linux (Servers, small wireless devices and data center switches). Over the past year (thanks to its maintainers and the community!) the project has seen many networking drivers (notably dsa) move to this new infrastructure and it also recently received a 100G switch driver user!

IPsec suffers from poor performance compared to non IPsec protocols. This is mostly because the needed crypto operations are cpu intensive, but also the IPsec networking path is not well optimized.

This BoF is to discuss possible improvements of the IPsec networking path.

Here we want to consider pure software improvements as well as hardware support for IPsec.

Possible improvements could be:

The Linux kernel does not fully utilize existing hardware capabilities provided by SR-IOV. As a result user-space consumers (such as libvirt) end up only supporting the most basic of features. The result is serious users of SR-IOV end up depending on proprietary implementations outside of Linux.

The purpose of this BOF is to get SR-IOV on Linux unstuck from the current stall.

Any of the following are highly encouraged to attend: