Open Stack

Howdy Ian!

Thanks for the background on the Passthrough work.

I reckon the best choice for us now is to use the traditional Neutron
APIs instead of Passthrough. I think they cover all of our use cases
as it stands now (many thanks to you for your earlier help with
working this out :)). The idea is to put the SR-IOV hardware to work
behind-the-scenes of a normal software switch.

We will definitely check out the Passthrough when it's ready and see
if we should also support that somehow.


On 11 January 2014 01:04, Ian Wells <ijw.ubuntu at cack.org.uk> wrote:
> Hey Luke,
>
> If you look at the passthrough proposals, the overview is that part of the
> passthrough work is to ensure there's an PCI function available to allocate
> to the VM, and part is to pass that function on to the Neutron plugin via
> conventional means.  There's nothing that actually mandates that you connect
> the SRIOV port using the passthrough mechanism, and we've been working on
> the assumption that we would be supporting the 'macvtap' method of
> attachment that Mellanox came up with some time ago.
>
> I think what we'll probably have is a set of standard attachments (including
> passthrough) added to the Nova drivers - you'll see in the virtualisation
> drivers that Neutron already gets to tell Nova how to attach the port and
> can pass auxiliary information - and we will pass the PCI path and,
> optionally, other parameters to Neutron in the port-update that precedes VIF
> plugging.  That would leave you with the option of passing the path back and
> requesting an actual passthrough or coming up with some other mechanism of
> your own choosing (which may not involve changing Nova at all, if you're
> using your standard virtual plugging mechanism).
>
> --
> Ian.
>
>
> On 10 January 2014 19:26, Luke Gorrie <luke at snabb.co> wrote:
>>
>> 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
>>
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>
>
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