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Beyond the (Switch)-Port: Exploring the World of Host Networking - BRKNWT-2620#

Cisco Live US 2026 (Las Vegas) digest Program Core pick Las Vegas · 31 May – 4 June 2026

Abstract

Bruce McDougall (Cisco), Chris Lapp (Cisco)

  • Why: Host-side networking is where this PM's physical and cloud-native interests converge — kernel bypass, eBPF datapaths, CNI performance, and SmartNICs in one arc.
  • What: A tour from the ToR switch port down into the host: native OS packet paths, hypervisor networking, the Kubernetes CNI ecosystem, and emerging sub-100µs host-networking techniques (from abstract only).
  • How: Compares virtio/SR-IOV and vSwitch options (OVS, VPP), benchmarks CNI choices — Calico "just routes," Cilium's eBPF policy datapaths, VPP-backed CNIs for terabit throughput — and looks ahead at XDP/AF_XDP kernel bypass, eBPF congestion control, and SmartNICs fusing packet processing with AI inference.
  • Where applicable: Broadly applicable to Linux host networking and K8s; the real-world benchmark claims (terabit VPP CNIs, sub-100µs paths) should be probed for environment specifics.