Open Stack

On Fri, 2017-04-28 at 13:23 +0900, TETSURO NAKAMURA wrote:
> Hi Nova team,
> 
> I'm writing this e-mail because I'd like to have a discussion about
> DPDK support at OpenStack Summit in Boston.
> 
> We have developed a dpdk-based patch panel named SPP[1], and we'd
> like to start working on Openstack (ML2 driver) to develop
> "networking-spp".
> 
> Especially, we'd like to use DPDK-ivshmem that was used to be used
> to create "dpdkr" interface in ovs-dpdk[2].

To the best of my knowledge, IVSHMEM ports are no longer supported in
upstream. The documentation for this feature was recently removed from
OVS [1] stating:

  - The ivshmem library has been removed in DPDK since DPDK 16.11.
  - The instructions/scheme provided will not work with current
    supported and future DPDK versions.
  - The linked patch needed to enable support in QEMU has never
    been upstreamed and does not apply to the last 4 QEMU releases.
  - Userspace vhost has become the defacto OVS-DPDK path to the guest.

Note: I worked on DPDK vSwitch [2] way back when, and there were severe
security implications with sharing a chunk of host memory between
multiple guests (which is how IVSHMEM works). I'm not at all surprised
the feature was killed.

> We have issued a blueprint[3] for that use case.

Per above, I don't think this is necessary. vhost-user ports already
work as expected in nova.

> As we are attending Boston Summit, could you have a discussion with
> us at the Summit?

I'll be around the summit (IRC: sfinucan) if you want to chat more.
However, I'd suggest reaching out to Sean Mooney or Igor Duarte Cardoso
(both CCd) if you want further information about general support of
OVS-DPDK in OpenStack and DPDK acceleration in SFC, respectively. I'd
also suggest looking at networking-ovs-dpdk [3] which contains a lot of
helper tools for using OVS-DPDK in OpenStack, along with links to a
Brighttalk video I recently gave regarding the state of OVS-DPDK in
OpenStack.

Hope this helps,
Stephen

[1] https://github.com/openvswitch/ovs/commit/90ca71dd317fea1ccf0040389
dae895aa7b2b561
[2] https://github.com/01org/dpdk-ovs
[3] https://github.com/openstack/networking-ovs-dpdk