[ovs-discuss] HW virt functions support

[Jesse Gross]

On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 3:13 PM, potworyk <potworyk at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2012/1/31 Jesse Gross <jesse at nicira.com>:
>> On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 2:27 PM, potworyk <potworyk at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I've searched for information about hardware support in Open vSwitch
>>> but there is no clear statment. Does Open vSwitch use SR-IOV, Intel
>>> VMDq or other? Where I can find some information about it?
>>
>> Those types of hardware offloads don't have the type of fine-grained
>> control that OVS needs to operate.
>
> Wouldn't that improve performance? For example pre sorting packets
> (and interrupts)  based on L2 data to specific CPU's, then on each
> core perform the upper layer checking?

Open vSwitch supports flow-based control at a level that is much more
fine-grained than L2.  There's no guarantee that the L2 information
alone will tell you where the packet needs to go.

RSS spreads processing and interrupts based on a hash, which is supported.