Anjali Singhai Jain, Willem de Bruijin, Sridhar Samudrala, and C. Xia will co-chair a discussion on Infrastructure datapath function(IDPF).

Infrastructure datapath function(IDPF) is a vendor neutral datapath function that provides standard host networking interfaces for hosts, containers and guests. These interfaces are exposed, controlled and configured by an infrastructure control plane. The plan is to make IDPF an Open standard by submitting drivers for the Interface to Linux upstream community, to Linux user space community along with software emulated device for IDPF and have the specification ratified by going through a standards process via Oasis technical steering committee.

IDPF supports core networking features including multiple tx/rx queues, stateless offloads like checksum offload, Large Segmentation Offload, Receive Side Scaling, Jumbo frames, RX Header Split, Receive side coalescing, vlan strip/insertion etc. The capabilities supported are negotiated with a control plane before exposing to the end user. The driver is designed to work with more or less of these offloads enabled by the device and can accommodate advanced offloads that can be added and negotiated as the device becomes more powerful. Some of the advanced offloads that IDPF can also negotiate are PTP, Packet pacing, Inline IPsec etc.

Anjali, Willem, Sridhar and Chenbo will lead a discussion on the motivation and the need for a standard datapath high performance network interface that works across vendors.

A WAG agenda includes discussions on:

1) The capability negotiation process, 2) Features supported 3) Plans for upstreaming and standardization of drivers and interface. 4) emulated IDPF devices and IDPF back-ends for simulation of new hardware features, multi-vendor environment deployment, live upgrade of software (driver)/firmware/hardware of IDPF devices, etc

More details: https://netdevconf.info/0x16/session.html?Infrastructure-datapath-function(I...

cheers, jamal