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OVS DOCA - The Evolution of hardware acceleration#

Open vSwitch and OVN 2024 Fall Conference (Prague) digest Program Adjacent pick Prague · 20–21 November 2024

Abstract Slides Recording

Speakers: Majd Dibbiny, Maor Dickman, NVIDIA

Play the recording: OVS DOCA - The Evolution of hardware acceleration

Why: Half product pitch, but it contains the cleanest public comparison of OVS's three datapath modes and discloses NVIDIA's upstreaming intent.

What: A mode-by-mode accounting: kernel offload via TC flower (mature, generic, but slow control path, kernel-cycle-bound feature set, can't express dp_hash), OVS-DPDK via rte_flow (kernel bypass, but too low-level, no CT offload, requires cross-vendor consensus), and OVS-DOCA — a DOCA DPIF using DOCA-FLOW with hardware steering claiming 10x+ programming rate, supported with OVN 24.03 and OVN-K8s GA 1.0, based on OVS LTS 3.3.

How: Roadmap items disclosed: upstreaming the DOCA DPIF, live update (Nov 2024 LTS), security acceleration (IPSec and PSP), debuggability, and scale.

Where applicable: NVIDIA hardware; the upstream DOCA DPIF item is the one with community-wide consequences (see Pluggable DPIF).