Linux Plumbers Conf 2010

One Line Summary

Abstract

Data Center Bridging (DCB) allows traditional Ethernet to meet the requirements of protocols and applications in the data center. The DCB effort is driving changes into the current 802.1 bridging specifications that need to be supported. Today DCB is implemented in multiple vendor chipsets and provides benefits typical of Fibre Channel and Infiniband over Ethernet. However, Linux support for DCB is incomplete as hardware architectures are not correctly abstracted in the OS, which leads to hardware specific solutions. More importantly, it is unclear how applications, protocol stacks and users are supposed to take advantage of the new capabilities offered by DCB.

This presentation will highlight benefits that DCB provides to the network, the ongoing enablement effort in the Linux kernel and the current challenges with creating DCB aware protocol stacks and applications. Finally, a proposed solution to fit DCB into existing QOS concepts will be given that should allow protocol stacks, applications, and users to use DCB regardless of the underlying hardware.

Tags

iSCSI, DCB, QoS, Userspace Network Configuration, FCoE

Speaker

• John Fastabend

  Intel
  Biography

  John is a software engineer in the LAN Access Division at Intel. He is responsible for supporting the Data Center Bridging initiatives in the Linux kernel. He is also the primary maintainer for lldpad an open source LLDP daemon.