OVS-DOCA live-upgrade#

Eli Britstein (NVIDIA)

• Why: Upgrading ovs-vswitchd in production today means a full daemon restart — losing conntrack state (dropping TCP sessions), FDB, meters, groups, TLV-map, configured routes, and tunnel neighbor tables, plus re-initializing ports with offloads. A zero-downtime model matters for any DC or carrier SLA.
• What: OVS-DOCA achieves in-place upgrades by starting the new version in client mode alongside the running server: the server keeps forwarding while the new instance initializes ports and offloads in parallel; volatile state is migrated to the new instance; then a zero-time handover and server termination. Version and resource constraints, failure handling, and rollback are addressed.
• How: DOCA can initialize the same ports from different userspace processes and hand over between them with zero interruption.
• Where applicable: OVS-DOCA (NVIDIA's downstream OVS) on ConnectX/BlueField — not upstream OVS today. The state-migration problem it solves, however, is universal for production OVS. (from abstract only; the slide deck could not be extracted and the program page adds nothing beyond the abstract)