[ovs-dev] OVS-DPDK public meeting

[Stokes, Ian]

> On Wed, May 30, 2018 at 7:49 PM, Kevin Traynor <ktraynor at redhat.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > Minutes of meeting Wed 30th May.
> >
> > [...]
> >
> 
> 
> > - DPDK 18.05
> > -- Will be released today/tomorrow
> > -- Some delays due to a lot of patches and last minute bug fixes
> >
> 
> Hi,
> I wanted to ask if anyone is already looking at DPDK 18.05 toleration or
> even exploitation.
> 
> I just tried to built recent OVS against it and (there might be more) at
> least dpdk change
>   cd8c7c7c ethdev: replace bus specific struct with generic dev
> 
> breaks OVS due to code in lib/netdev-dpdk.c accessing that with an error
> like:
> 
> ../lib/netdev-dpdk.c:2800:17: error: ‘struct rte_eth_dev_info’ has no
> member named ‘pci_dev’
>      if (dev_info.pci_dev) {
> 
> I re-built an old 2.9.0, but saw that even on master the code still is as-
> is, so I assume OVS master and coming 2.9.3 are affected as well.
> 

Thanks for raising Christian,

It wouldn't be a clean transition from 17.11 to 18.05 as there are a few changes (as you have spotted). AFAIK there are also changes to the meter library to provision profiles, this would have to be addressed in OVS also.

> Usually a few days after DPDK there were patches for OVS, but so far I
> found nothing on the mailing list.
> So I wanted to ask if there is someone already (planning to) work on
> these?

I was planning to if the community agreed it was warranted.

However the general feeling expressed at the past few community calls is that the next move should be to DPDK 18.11 LTS and I tend to agree with this.

The main advantage of this is the DPDK LTS lifecycle provides bug fixes for DPDK for 2 years from release. Moving to a non DPDK LTS becomes a pain as critical bug fixes will not be backported on the DPDK side so are not addressed in OVS with DPDK either, we've seen this with some of the CVE fixes for vhost quite recently.

18.05 is also the largest DPDK release to date with a lot of code being introduced in the later RC stages which IMO increases the risk rather than the gain of moving to it.

However I'm open to discussing if a move to 18.05 is warranted, are there any critical features or usecases it enables that you had in mind?

Thanks
Ian

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