Open Stack

Greetings,

Apologies for chiming in very late into the spec cycle. Netronome is
completing its internal processes in order to allow developers to
contribute code to OpenStack and we should be able to share patches
within the week. Additional apologies for the long wall of text that's
following.

We would really like to upstream support for our NICs in Pike. We've
got patches that hook into core Nova (and make a tiny modification to
the Neutron ML2 OVS mechanism plugin) to allow VM's to be plugged into
our NIC's accelerated ports.

The mechanism that we chose was to add another set of VNIC types (in
the same group where   VNIC_TYPE_NORMAL and VNIC_TYPE_DIRECT are
defined), for the two separate plugging methods that we support. It's
also very possible for us to just add one more (VNIC_TYPE_RELAY) and
have everything work for us.

(we also considered flavor and glance annotations, but chose this
method for flexibility)

We have two methods to plug VMs into the bridge. On Nova's side, they
look either like vhost-user, or SR-IOV passthrough. On Neutron's side,
everything look like an OVS bridge. Crucially, we support all three
methods (standard TAP, SR-IOV and vhost-user) on the _same_ bridge,
with SR-IOV and vhost-user accelerated, and with everything except
SR-IOV being live-migrateable.

I'm hoping that, by tomorrow, we'll have the necessary internal
permissions in place to start discussing code. We'd appreciate any
advice on processes and protocol to follow.

Would it still be possible to jump on the Pike release? There is
absolutely no emotional attachment to this code, so if a major
redesign is on the cards, we'd be very agreeable to do so.

Thanks again very much for reading this sizeable missive. I hope we
can get on board and start contributing to OpenStack as soon as
possible. (There's a lot of automatic tuning, pinning and scheduling
support bits we'd like to contribute as well.)

-- 
Jan Gutter
Embedded Networking Software Engineer

Netronome | First Floor Suite 1, Block A, Southdowns Ridge Office Park,
Cnr Nellmapius and John Vorster St, Irene, Pretoria, 0157
Phone: +27 (12) 665-4427 | Skype: jangutter |  www.netronome.com