[ovs-dev] [PATCH v2 0/6] Add OVS DPDK keep-alive functionality

[Bodireddy, Bhanuprakash]

Hi Darrel, Aaron

>There two ways to go with the design.
>
>1) Make it generic, so that it is not so PMD specific, as it is now.
>2) If it stays PMD specific, make it stronger; right now, the health check is
>limited – it detects that a PMD thread is proceeding or not.
>For something like DPDK, I don’t think that will be enough in the long run.
>This can result in some false negatives, as well.
>              Maybe, we want to know that the ports and queues are getting
>processed, PMD/port/queue mappings as expected, time spent processing
>packets per PMD, port state changes, packet stats, queue depths, etc This
>information could be correlated by the final receiver of the data.
>
>I also agree that socket communication is preferred over shm, although I don’t
>think any shm usage will necessarily lead to a meltdown.

I have posted a new version of Keepalive patch series here: https://mail.openvswitch.org/pipermail/ovs-dev/2017-June/333546.html
I posted the new version as RFC instead of v3 for below reason:
  1)  I have considered using OVSDB for storing the Keepalive status, want to know what you think about this.
  2)  6-7 of the unit tests were failing due to OVSDB changes. I am looking in to those issues.
  3) Apart of heartbeats(that were enabled earlier), I have implemented few more APIs to do the additional health checks as suggested in this thread(port status/ packet stats/pmd cycles etc). The first version of APIs are posted in the series and currently working on hardening them for all corner cases.
  4) Note that SHM is still used here but only for intra process communication(b/n vswitchd and Keepalive thread). Monitoring framework(collectd) would only read from OVSDB.

I tried making the APIs generic, but however it is implemented for DPDK datapath at this point.

Regards,
Bhanuprakash.