Willem de Bruijn says that lack of clear operating conditions, vague feature definitions and dearth of publicly available tests makes it hard to deploy at scale NIC offloads from multiple vendors. Issues seen in deployments range from inconsistency between devices, scalability limits, incompatibility with real production workloads, and simply hardware bugs; even a commodity offload as a checksum is not as well defined if you look across multiple vendor implementations.

Willem will discuss why providing a way to define these offloads precisely, in a way that scales and avoids common bugs, while combining expertise from multiple vendors and users is the way to go. More importantly he believes that sharing all those details in an open and unencumbered format would help alleviate if not solve the current wild-west approach. The effort is currently housed under the auspices of the "OCP NIC Core Offloads specifications". Willem will go over some critical offloads, from established to novel ongoing work, such as pacing and inline crypto and show how they can fail in practice. And last but not least provide an overview of some of the testcases which have already been contributed to the kernel tree including tests for RSS, HW-GRO, TSO and others.

cheers, jamal

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