Netdev 0.1 - Hardware Offloading BoF (Part 1 of 9)
Channel: netdevconf
Date: 07/04/2015

Hardware Offloading BoF
Shrijeet Mukherjee
February 2015


Part 1 of 9 in the Hardware Offloading BoF series

Description from netdev01.org:
 Networking is all about interoperation and best way to achieve that is to use an open implementation with consistent interfaces as provided by the Linux kernel.

Currently packet processing offloading in Linux networking is being extended to support different capabilities which may have conflicting interests. A sample space is by:

    NICs that support acceleration of certain packet paths
        May include basic L2 processing
        May include flow processing
    Switches that support basic managed L2 support
    ASICs that support L2/3 and ACLs
    Switches that can pretend to be a multi-ported nic
    NICs that are multiported
        And support VEPA mode
        And support EVB mode
        Can learn, manage timers or need hypervisor/OS support to manage them
        PCIe level virtualization
    NPUs and speacial purpose packet processors that
        mangling operations in
        Load balancing at Application/L3/L2 layers
        IPSEC offload
        More complex flow graph offload

To provide uniformity in interfaces, the control interfaces via standard kernel APIs are used; and consensus needs to be reached on the different offload interfaces.

This BOF intends to bring together all the stakeholders and gather guidelines that need to be agreed upon so as to not stifle innovation, but also ensure that the concept of a Linux networking interfaces do not get diluted in the process. 


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