Open vSwitch 2014 Fall Conference: Accelerating the Path to the Guest

Open vSwitch 2014 Fall Conference: Accelerating the Path to the Guest

presented by: Maryam Tahhan, Kevin Traynor, and Mark Gray, Intel

With the rise of NFV use cases, Virtual Network Functions require high bandwidth, low-latency interfaces into the Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI). Userspace VHOST and IVSHMEM provide two interfaces into OVS that have these characteristics. Inter VM Shared Memory (IVSHMEM) facilitates fast zero-copy data sharing from host-to-guest by means of QEMU's IVSHMEM mechanism. Vhost-net facilitates an accelerated virtio-net interface, host-to-guest by accelerating the vhost backend with a DPDK userspace implementation.

In this talk we compare and contrast these accelerated paths to the guest that have been recently enabled in netdev-dpdk and explore possible future work.