[ovs-dev] Invitation: OVS-DPDK bi-weekly meeting...

[Stokes, Ian]

Meeting minutes. Feel free to correct/add.

Note: The attendees section is probably not be complete, I assumed bluejeans would keep a record of attendees after the meeting closed but this is not the case when attending via a guest account, mea culpa. If you attended and are not listed feel free to flag it to me and I will update the minutes in the google doc.

15th June 2017

ATTENDEES
Darrell Ball, Eelco Chaudon, Sugesh Chandran, Michael Lilja, Mark Kavanagh, Ian Stokes, Billy O'Mahony, Simon Horman, Aaron Conole, Mark Gray, Kevin Traynor.

GENERAL
- DPDK 17.05 update

-- Is it well tested for both vhost's - multiqueue, reconnect etc.?
--- Regression testing has been ongoing for 17.05. Michal sent RFC with errata of known issues.
--- https://mail.openvswitch.org/pipermail/ovs-dev/2017-June/333846.html

-- Impact of DPDK vHost mem reallocation bug. When will NUMA bug fix be available on a stable branch?
--- Fix is expected to be part of DPDK 17.05.1.
--- Originally DPDK 17.05.1 would not be available until at least 2 weeks after DPDK 17.08 release, 17.08 targeted for August 1st.
--- It may be possible to have DPDK 17.05.1 release earlier than planned so as to be supported in mainstream OVS for the OVS 2.8 release.
--- Mark Kavanagh to follow up on this with John Mcnamara of DPDK and report findings to the OVS ML.

-- Is it possible to push OVS 2.8 release out to allow the inclusion of DPDK 17.05.1?
--- This is not the preferred option.
--- Better to support DPDK 17.05 in OVS 2.8 and document the limitation regarding vHost numa for the release with a note that it is expected to be fixed when DPDK 17.05.1 is released and supported in OVS.

- OVS DPDK maintainer/s
-- There doesn't seem to be a maintainer for OVS-DPDK since Danielle's departure. 
-- Are there plans for a replacement?
--- It's clear that there is more activity in relation to patches & reviews/testing on the ML from OVS DPDK community.
--- Lack of OVS DPDK maintainer to push patches is recognized as a bottleneck.
--- Current process is Ben to apply patches based on feedback from Darrell and a few others.
--- Darrell to speak to Ben regarding this issue and report back at next OVS-DPDK bi-weekly sync.

 
PERFORMANCE/FEATURES
- Cross NUMA allocation
-- Any more feedback regarding allocating ports to non-local pmds for DPDK devices?
-- Patch is mature (v6), has received feedback and testing to date.
-- https://mail.openvswitch.org/pipermail/ovs-dev/2017-June/333942.html
--- Darrel looked at the patch previously, will plan to re-review next week.
 
HARDWARE OFFLOAD
- Activity this week on ML with tc flower implementation being committed to master for HWOL kernel support.
- Quite important for OVS DPDK to support DPDK HWOL or face losing competiveness against kernel solution.
- Few groups already have internal HWOL implementations yet to be shared with the community but work is in progress (Mellanox, Netronome, Intel, Napatech).
- There is a trend towards an rte flow approach for HWOL in OVS DPDK.
- Michael Lilja shared the following ongoing work: https://github.com/napatech/ovs/blob/master/rte_flow_acceleration.rst
- Suggestion is that a separate forum be setup to discuss HWOL implementations for OVS-DPDK.