[dpdk-dev] [dpdk-announce] DPDK Features for Q1 2015

["O'driscoll, Tim" <tim.o'driscoll@intel.com>]

We're starting to plan our DPDK features for next year. We're planning to have a DPDK 2.0 release at the end of March, and we'd like to inform the community of the features that we hope to submit to that release. The current list of features, along with brief descriptions, is included below.

There will naturally be some changes to this list as work on these features progresses. Some will inevitably turn out to be bigger than anticipated and will need to be deferred to a later date, while other priorities will arise and need to be accommodated. So, this list will be subject to change, and should be taken as guidance on what we hope to submit, not a commitment.

Our aim in providing this information now is to solicit input from the community. We'd like to make sure we avoid duplication or conflicts with work that others are planning, so we'd be interested in hearing any plans that others in the community have for contributions to DPDK in this timeframe. This will allow us to build a complete picture and ensure we avoid duplication of effort. 

I'm sure people will have questions, and will be looking for more information on these features. Further details will be provided by the individual developers over the next few months. We aim to make better use of the RFC process in this release, and provide early outlines of the features so that we can obtain community feedback as soon as possible.

We also said at the recent DPDK Summit that we would investigate holding regular community conference calls. We'll be scheduling the first of these calls soon, and will use this to discuss the 2.0 (Q1 2015) features in a bit more detail.


2.0 (Q1 2015) DPDK Features:
Bifurcated Driver: With the Bifurcated Driver, the kernel will retain direct control of the NIC, and will assign specific queue pairs to DPDK. Configuration of the NIC is controlled by the kernel via ethtool.

Support the new Intel SoC platform, along with the embedded 10GbE NIC.

Packet Reordering: Assign a sequence number to packets on Rx, and then provide the ability to reorder on Tx to preserve the original order.

Packet Distributor (phase 2): Implement the following enhancements to the Packet Distributor that was originally delivered in the DPDK 1.7 release: performance improvements; the ability for packets from a flow to be processed by multiple worker cores in parallel and then reordered on Tx using the Packet Reordering feature; the ability to have multiple Distributors which share Worker cores.

Support Multiple Threads per Core: Use Linux cgroups to allow multiple threads to run on a single core. This would be useful in situations where a DPDK thread does not require the full resources of a core.

Support the Fedora 21 OS.

Support the host interface for Intel's next generation Ethernet switch. This only covers basic support for the host interface. Support for additional features will be added later.

Cuckoo Hash: A new hash algorithm was implemented as part of the Cuckoo Switch project (see http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dongz/papers/cuckooswitch.pdf), and shows some promising performance results. This needs to be modified to make it more generic, and then incorporated into DPDK.

Provide DPDK support for uio_pci_generic.

Integrated Qemu Userspace vHost: Modify Userspace vHost to use Qemu version 2.1, and remove the need for the kernel module (cuse.ko).

PCI Hot Plug: When you migrate a VM, you need hot plug support as the new VF on the new hardware you are running on post-migration needs to be initialized. With an emulated NIC migration is seamless as all configuration for the NIC is within the RAM of the VM and the hypervisor. With a VF you have actual hardware in the picture which needs to be set up properly.

Additional XL710/X710 40-Gigabit Ethernet Controller Features:	Support for additional XL710/X710 40-Gigabit Ethernet Controller features, including bandwidth and QoS management, NVGRE and other network overlay support, TSO, IEEE1588, DCB support.  SR-IOV switching and port mirroring.

Single Virtio Driver: Merge existing Virtio drivers into a single implementation, incorporating the best features from each of the existing drivers.

X32 ABI: This is an application binary interface project for the Linux kernel that allows programs to take advantage of the benefits of x86-64 (larger number of CPU registers, better floating-point performance, faster position-independent code shared libraries, function parameters passed via registers, faster syscall instruction) while using 32-bit pointers and thus avoiding the overhead of 64-bit pointers.

AVX2 ACL: Modify ACL library to use AVX2 instructions to improve performance.

Interrupt mode for PMD: Allow DPDK process to transition to interrupt mode when load is low so that other processes can run, or else power can be saved. This will increase latency/jitter.

DPDK Headroom: Provide a mechanism to indicate how much headroom (spare capacity) exists in a DPDK process.


Thanks,
Tim