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0x17: Virtualization related talks
by Jamal Hadi Salim 11 Oct '23

11 Oct '23

We have two talks on virtualization @0x17. In the first talk Yahui Cao, Phani R Burra, Anjali Singhai and Sridhar samudrala discuss VM live migration using IDPF. They discuss some of the implementation choices that are made in the IDPF driver to help make Live migration support generic enough for all vendors that plan to support IDPF easy to implement. Details at: https://netdevconf.info/0x17/30 In the second talk, Yui Washizu describes how to do offloading for containers inside VMs while using VFs - a tricky proposition considering existing solutions like the SR-IOV CNI plug-in creates and configures Virtual Functions (VFs) by accessing Physical Functions (PFs). Yui Washizu will show the details of our approach, the performance numbers of the PoC and plans for future switchdev mode. Details at: https://netdevconf.info/0x17/20 cheers, jamal

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0x17: Talk, netdev development stats and process changes
by Jamal Hadi Salim 10 Oct '23

10 Oct '23

Apologies for the earlier automated email. Here's a better one ;-> Netdev Maintainer Jakub Kicinski will take a look back at the last year of development in netdev through the lens of development statistics and process changes. He will share his thoughts on upcoming challenges an how to overcome them. cheers, jamal

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0x17: Talk, netdev development stats and process changes Speakers Jakub Kicinski Label Nuts and Bolts Session Type Talk Description Look back at the last year of development in netdev through the lens of development statistics and process changes. Discussion on challenges ahead.
by Jamal Hadi Salim 10 Oct '23

10 Oct '23

Netdev Maintainer Jakub Kicinski will take a look back at the last year of development in netdev through the lens of development statistics and process changes. He will share his thoughts on upcoming challenges an how to overcome them. cheers, jamal

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TCP Offload via AF_XDP sockets– Not your grandmother’s TCP Offload!
by Jamal Hadi Salim 08 Oct '23

08 Oct '23

Tom Herbert says the key to doing TOE is to offload TCP connection processing and TCP state machine from a host CPU to a SmartNIC CPU running Linux. This is not your grandma's TCP offload anymore! AF_XDP sockets are used to provide a generic and extensible offload messaging interface. Tom takes a different approach than[1]. He believes the solution is to run a TCP “proxy” running in the SmartNIC CPU. In this talk Tom will cover the overall design, the messaging API used over AF_XDP sockets, the client library, the TCP “proxy” running in the SmartNIC CPU, and example application code. The full lifetime of an offloaded connection is described including connection setup and tear down, data operations, flow control over the messaging interface. He'll further discuss the hardware requirements. [1]https://netdevconf.info/0x17/sessions/talk/kernel-offload-with-complete-host-kernel-functionalities.html cheers, jamal

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0x17: Talk, Netlink APIs to Expose/Configure Netdev Objects
by Jamal Hadi Salim 08 Oct '23

08 Oct '23

Work to reduce the amount of developer involvement in netlink coding has been widely successful[1]. To name a few existing consumers of this new approach: devlink, ethtool, DPLL, FOU, XDP, TLS handshake[2], etc. You essentially define your netlink messaging and attributes in YAML and a compiler outputs not only all the commodity code (parsing, validating, etc) that you would have had to write (and make mistakes in) but also documentation(as you all know: developers like to write documentation. Not)! In this talk, Amritha Nambiar and Sridhar Samudrala extend the netlink definition of netdev-genl to add support for additional netdev objects: queue and NAPI. Queues are exposed as netlink objects, enabling visibility to per queue attributes (example, NAPI instance servicing the queue, stats, memory model etc.). NAPI instances are used to expose attributes such as the NAPI id, NAPI device, interrupt number associated with the NAPI instance and PID of the NAPI thread. Amritha and Sridhar say their work opens a lot of opportunities for interesting use cases. Example, the new netlink communication could be used to create queues etc. for multiple usecases (RSS context handling, Rx zerocopy, XDP); adjusting the NAPI thread priorities and SMP affinity. Additionally, with this features in place, one could also configure NAPI pollers to queues from the userspace. This could be used to limit the number of NAPI instances by configuring a poller to be shared among queues that are on an interrupt vector, etc. In this talk, they will discuss the design and how it interacts with the driver subsystem; they will further discuss challenges faced and their solutions as well as future work. Come and engage them in the discussion! [1]https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/netlink/specs.html [2]https://netdevconf.info/0x17/sessions/bof/tls-handshake-for-in-kernel-consumers.html cheers, jamal

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0x17: Talk, kernel offload with complete host kernel functionalities
by Jamal Hadi Salim 08 Oct '23

08 Oct '23

Offloading relieves the host resources to be used for application work. Traditional offloading has been focussed mostly with either plumbing features (TSO, checksum, etc) or limited L4 (TC offloads, etc). Offloading of TCP machinery -famously called TOE- for example has been frowned upon for many reasons[1]. Ryo Nakamura and Hajime Tazaki feel they could address these outstanding issues transparently. The application on the host has no idea that the rest of the stack is outsourced somewhere else... How, you ask? On the host side they intercept system calls made by the application and transparently route them to a syscall proxy sitting on an xPU. The syscall proxy, which is a lightweight user space program, interfaces on the northbound to the host and on its southbound to Linux Kernel Library(LKL)[2]. LKL is optimized to improve packet processing code paths. Our esteemed speakers have implemented this feature using the Nvidia Bluefield DPU. In this talk they will present the design of the offload and discuss results of various workload performance tests: 1) a typical TCP transmission flow with existing offloading feature (TSO/LRO, checksum), 2) avoiding data copying between host and NIC with sendfile syscalls, and 3) kTLS offload with sendfile syscall (but not optimized as no hardware crypto offloading) over existing implementations (nginx and openssl). Last, but not least, they will briefly discuss the opportunities for the future improvements, including further offload (crypto, larger segmentation size for TCP, our RDMA channel implementation, and a choice of passthrough method, etc). [1]https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/networking/toe [2]https://lkl.github.io/ cheers, jamal

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0x17: Talk, Nanotube: Turning XDP Code into Custom Hardware Pipelines for FPGA SmartNICs
by Jamal Hadi Salim 07 Oct '23

07 Oct '23

Many modern NICs have built-in packet processing capabilities that can effectively perform the type of use case that XDP is often used for. Stephan Diestelhorst, Neil Turton, Kieran Mansley, Kimon Karras, Rip Sohan , Thomas Calvert and Steven Pope say that being able to seamlessly offload this XDP code to the NIC – under the control of the Linux networking subsystem and tooling – would increase server efficiency and performance without affecting the user experience. Stephan Diestelhorst et al will discuss Nanotube: an open-source compiler that consumes standard XDP code and produces a tailor-made, application-specific dataflow pipeline suitable for execution on FPGA NIC platforms. They have demonstrated generated Katran on AMD/Xilinx FPGA-based NICs to offload with throughput at line rate (100 Gbps) on AMD NICs! In this talk they will describe (i) the structure of the compiler; (ii) performance of typical workloads; and (iii) how map accesses by host software are supported using specially annotated packets over the normal host data path. And last but not least they will discuss requirements to allow better integration and support by the Linux kernel, in particular the validator, map handling, and vendor-neutral support requirements. cheers, jamal

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0x17: Talk, P4 Compatible Control Plane Driver for Linux Kernel
by Jamal Hadi Salim 07 Oct '23

07 Oct '23

Our friends at Intel and AMD will share their thoughts on how to integrate P4TC[1] into their drivers. In this talk Anjali Singhai, Neha Singh, James Choi, Namrata Limaye, Sridhar Samudrala, Mahesh Shirshyad and Vipin Jain will discuss enhancements to existing TC offload interfaces to accommodate multiple P4 pipeline and runtime control. They will elaborate on the association of the s/w and h/w datapaths, hardware P4 dataplane loading and initialization as well as runtime control (using the classical skip_sw/hw flagging). These details will include describing the kernel infrastructures and any extension to current TC offload. Anjali et all will discuss potential enable shimming of legacy kernel offloads such as tc-flower on to P4TC interfaces. Additionally, they will talk about interfaces to support legacy hooks (switchdev ops, FDB ops) and coexistence of these with P4TC compatible driver. They will make the infrastructure code at the conference. cheers, jamal [1] https://netdevconf.info/0x17/sessions/talk/integrating-ebpf-into-the-p4tc-d…

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0x17: Talk, SO_TIMESTAMPING: powering fleetwide RPC monitoring
by Jamal Hadi Salim 07 Oct '23

07 Oct '23

Willem de Bruijn says timestamping, via SO_TIMESTAMPING, is key to debugging network stack latency. Instead of gut-feel finger pointing between network and kernel tribes we can just get down to the facts of where the latency really is. SO_TIMESTAMPING can isolate transmission, reception and even scheduling sources. Capturing connection state along with timestamps further enables root cause discovery, such as TCP receive window size. Capturing timestamps at more points, such as traffic shaping and NIC hardware, expands visibility to tough issues like incast. SO_TIMESTAMPING has seen iterative development to enable fleetwide RPC monitoring at Google. They presented details of this infra called "Fathom" at SIGCOMM 2023[1]. In this talk Willem will start us beyond where that SIGCOMM paper ends. He will take a deep dive on the Linux kernel infrastructure that makes fleetwide continuous latency analysis and attribution possible. API extensions include covering TCP bytestreams, capturing transport protocol state along with events (OPT_STAT), and supporting selective sampling (OPT_CMSG). The talk reviews the core SO_TIMESTAMPING API, discusses non-obvious extensions (MSG_EOR, SO_RCVLOWAT), summarizes gotchas from the field (OPT_ID_TCP), and explains how all this combines to enable robust continuous RPC monitoring. It touches on clock synchronization and precision. Finally, it compares this UAPI to dynamic tracing with uprobes, kprobes, tracepoints and BPF. Should be fun, cant wait to attend this talk! [1] search for "fathom" at https://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2023/program.html cheers, jamal

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Assessing the impact of Linux networking on CPU consumption
by Jamal Hadi Salim 07 Oct '23

07 Oct '23

You may be a guru at reading perf output and then with a handwave, swish, you can whip your bash script into a frenzy to create flame graphs... but you would still need to dig deeper and isolate where your bottlenecks in the network are. Davide Miola, Fulvio Risso and Federico Parola took a different approach by creating a tool using eBPF to instrument strategic functions in the network RX and TX entry-points. They crafted a novel tool that they call "Netto"[1] which gives you a focussed view of only the network infra's contribution. Netto can give you answers to coarse grained details of "how much is the rx softirq chewing vs RX syscall" all the way to more fine-grained rx softirq details like the driver cost, GRO, NF, etc. And then do all this in real time with low cpu overhead... In this talk, Davide et al will go into details of the design and functionality of Netto as well as describe the different kernel hook points. They will then illustrate how one would be able to use this tool to get insights into the network infra's overheads for a specific workload. [1]https://github.com/miolad/netto cheers, jamal

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