Open Stack

Hi Mike,

On 10 January 2014 17:35, Michael Bright <mjbrightfr at gmail.com> wrote:

> Very pleased to see this initiative in the OpenStack/NFV space.

Glad to hear it!

> A dumb question - how do you see this related to the ongoing
>      "[openstack-dev] [nova] [neutron] PCI pass-through network support"
>
> discussion on this list?
>
> Do you see that work as one component within your proposed architecture for
> example or an alternative implementation?

Good question. I'd like to answer separately about the underlying
technology on the one hand and the OpenStack API on the other.

The underlying technology of SR-IOV and IOMMU hardware capabilities
are the same in PCI pass-through and Snabb NFV. The difference is that
we introduce a very thin layer of software over the top that preserves
the basic zero-copy operation while adding a Virtio-net abstraction
towards the VM, packet filtering, tunneling, and policing (to start
off with). The design goal is to add quite a bit of functionality with
only a modest processing cost.

The OpenStack API question is more open. How should we best map our
functionality onto Neutron APIs? This is something we need to thrash
out together with the community. Our current best guess - which surely
needs much revision, and is not based on the PCI pass-through
blueprint - is here:
https://github.com/SnabbCo/snabbswitch/tree/snabbnfv-readme/src/designs/nfv#neutron-configuration

Cheers,
-Luke