Open vSwitch 2014 Fall Conference: OVS – Accelerating the Dataplane through netmap/VALE
presented by: Luigi Rizzo, Università di Pisa
The dataplane performance of OVS is especially important when dealing with high packet rates such as the one that firewalls and network protection systems are subject to.
The netmap framework provides an efficient and architecture independent API for doing packet I/O at over 10 Mpps per port, for both physical interfaces and Virtual Ports (through a completely software module, the VALE switch). Extensions to support segmentation offloading guarantee high performance and efficiency lso for bulk TCP traffic.
In this talk we will present how we used netmap/VALE in OVS both as a userspace and an in-kernel dataplane, supporting both Linux and FreeBSD and a variety of high speed hardware. netmap support is also available for several virtualization solutions (Qemu, Xen, bhyve), and this makes it an interesting solution for deploying high performance OVS instances.