[ovs-dev] [PATCH RFC 0/3] AF_XDP support for OVS

[Ben Pfaff]

[dropping iovisor-dev as I'm not on that list]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2018 at 05:29:33PM -0700, William Tu wrote:
> The patch series introduces AF_XDP support for OVS netdev.
> AF_XDP is a new address family working together with eBPF.
> In short, a socket with AF_XDP family can receive and send
> packets from an eBPF/XDP program attached to the netdev.
> For more details about AF_XDP, please see linux kernel's
> Documentation/networking/af_xdp.rst
> 
> OVS has a couple of netdev types, i.e., system, tap, or
> internal.  The patch first adds a new netdev types called
> "afxdp", and implement its configuration, packet reception,
> and transmit functions.  Since the AF_XDP socket, xsk,
> operates in userspace, once ovs-vswitchd receives packets
> from xsk, the proposed architecture re-uses the existing
> userspace dpif-netdev datapath.  As a result, most of
> the packet processing happens at the userspace instead of
> linux kernel.

This is really cool.  BPF and XDP and AF_XDP are all fascinating
technology and I'd like to see OVS able to take advantage of them.

What do you see as the next step for this patch series?  I see that it's
an RFC and that it depends on a fairly long patch series.  Is the next
step to rebase the series and start to get parts of it into the OVS
tree?  Or is it to refine this AF_XDP patch series first?  Or do you
have some other approach in mind?

Thanks,

Ben.