Proposals

Data Center Bridging in the Linux kernel

This proposal has been rejected.

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One Line Summary

Presentation will highlight the ongoing efforts for enabling data center bridging technologies in the Linux kernel and address the current shortcomings and potential solutions.

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 and protocol stacks are supposed to take advantage of the new capabilities offered by DCB in a hardware agnostic environment.

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 and applications to use DCB regardless of the underlying hardware.

Tags

storage, networking, DCB, data center

Speaker

  • 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.

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