[ovs-dev] criteria/benchmarks for an improved userspace datapath classifier?

[Flavio Leitner]

On Tue, Jul 02, 2019 at 10:00:44AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> Hi Ilya and Ian.  Please allow me to introduce Michal Orsak, a grad
> student currently looking at packet classifiers.  He's implemented a
> novel classifier that is faster than the one already in OVS in the
> benchmarks that he's run.  His classifier is tree-based, like most
> high-performance classifiers, but also incremental so that flows can be
> inserted and deleted individually without undue delay.  Ultimately, it
> might make sense to replace the OVS userspace datapath classifier by one
> based on the concepts that he's come up with.
> 
> A difficulty with classifiers, however, is coming up with an appropriate
> set of benchmarks to compare them fairly.  The userspace datapath
> focuses on performance, so do you have a set of benchmarks that you
> recommend for comparison?  Are there other criteria that would be
> important (besides correctness)?
> 
> (I'd take answers from anyone, not just Ian and Ilya!)

Hi Ben,

We use 1M constant IPv4 flows, and 200k new and 200k retiring IPv4
flows per second to compare as it seems to be close to some production
workloads.

fbl