Proposals

Linux Bridging - hardware offloads, IEEE802.1Qbg and future trends

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BoF
60 minute BoF

One Line Summary

Discuss early work to support hardware offloads in bridging module and unifying Linux switching solutions.

Abstract

This session will be used to discuss early work to support bridging offloads and specifications IEEE802.1Qbg and IEEE802.1Qbh. The Linux kernel uses MACVLANs and the de facto bridging module to support these modes. While some users prefer an out of kernel solution open-vswitch.

Hardware offloads currently exists to support bridging but are not being exposed to the user. Specifically SR-IOV uses an embedded switch that is currently either hidden from the OS or exposed in a proprietary interface. Supporting these offloads in all of the above mentioned implementations seems overkill. A good outcome from this BoF would be an agreed upon path to unify these solutions and interfaces likely candidates being iproute2 macvlan or bridge extensions.

Tags

virtualization, bridge, switching, 802.1Q, 802.1D

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Speaker

  • John Fastabend

    Intel

    Biography

    John is a network software engineer in Intel’s LAN Access Division. He maintains the open-lldp project, lldpad and focuses on related Data Center Bridging (DCB) and Edge Virtual Bridging (EVB) items.