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Our new paper RSS++: load and state-aware receive side scaling

I’m delighted to announce the publication of our latest paper titled “RSS++: load and state-aware receive side scaling” at CoNEXT’19.

Abstract

While the current literature typically focuses on load-balancing among multiple servers, in this paper, we demonstrate the importance of load-balancing within a single machine (potentially with hundreds of CPU cores). In this context, we propose a new load-balancing technique (RSS++) that dynamically modifies the receive side scaling (RSS) indirection table to spread the load across the CPU cores in a more optimal way. RSS++ incurs up to 14x lower 95th percentile tail latency and orders of magnitude fewer packet drops compared to RSS under high CPU utilization. RSS++ allows higher CPU utilization and dynamic scaling of the number of allocated CPU cores to accommodate the input load while avoiding the typical 25% over-provisioning.

RSS++ has been implemented for both (i) DPDK and (ii) the Linux kernel. Additionally, we implement a new state migration technique which facilitates sharding and reduces contention between CPU cores accessing per-flow data. RSS++ keeps the flow-state by groups that can be migrated at once, leading to a 20% higher efficiency than a state of the art shared flow table.

Paper ; Video ; Slides

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Our latest paper “Metron: NFV Service Chains at the True Speed of the Underlying Hardware” has been accepted at NSDI 2018 !

Abstract

In this paper we present Metron, a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) platform that achieves high resource utilization by jointly exploiting the underlying network and commodity servers’ resources. This synergy allows Metron to: (i) offload part of the packet processing logic to the network, (ii) use smart tagging to setup and exploit the affinity of traffic classes, and (iii) use tag-based hardware dispatching to carry out the remaining packet processing at the speed of the servers’ fastest cache(s), with zero intercore communication. Metron also introduces a novel resource allocation scheme that minimizes the resource allocation overhead for large-scale NFV deployments. With commodity hardware assistance, Metron deeply inspects traffic at 40 Gbps and realizes stateful network functions at the speed of a 100 GbE network card on a single server. Metron has 2.75-6.5x better efficiency than OpenBox, a state of the art NFV system, while ensuring key requirements such as elasticity, fine-grained load balancing, and flexible traffic steering.

Paper, slides & video

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Do HUAWEI CloudEngine switches support OpenFlow?

No, no and no.

Despite what the ONF says (https://www.opennetworking.org/product-registry/) it is not. Huawei’s OpenFlow implementation is actually broken. The very first  HELLO OpenFlow message is broken. It reports support for OpenFlow 1.4 in the HELLO message, but the rest of the message is absolutely not structured as defined in the standard.

After contacting all parties, it is clear that nobody will move about that, especially HUAWEI which wants to sell the Agile controller for a high price. It would appear that an old firmware, announcing OpenFlow 1.3 was compliant at the certification time but only if using an old software compliant with OpenFlow 1.3.0 and not newer, as starting with 1.3.1 after that the message is broken too.

Funny, I recently bought a HUAWEI smartphone that had trouble with SmartWatches. The seller told me that most smartwatches worked with every phones except Huawei ones, because their bluetooth implementation is not compliant. Seems to be a habit…