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