Open vSwitch Hardware assisted filtering
Channel: Sniper Network
Date: 31/07/2019

Open vSwitch is a software implementation of a virtual multilayer network switch, designed to enable effective network automation through programmatic extensions, while supporting standard management interfaces and protocols such as NetFlow, sFlow, SPAN, RSPAN, CLI, LACP and 802.1ag. In addition, Open vSwitch is designed to support transparent distribution across multiple physical servers by enabling creation of cross-server switches in a way that abstracts out the underlying server architecture, similar to the VMware vNetwork distributed vswitch or Cisco Nexus 1000V.

Open vSwitch can operate both as a software-based network switch running within a virtual machine (VM) hypervisor, and as the control stack for dedicated switching hardware; as a result, it has been ported to multiple virtualization platforms, switching chipsets, and networking hardware accelerators .Open vSwitch is the default network switch in the XenServer virtualization platform since its version 6.0,and in the Xen Cloud Platform via its XAPI management toolstack. It also supports Xen, Linux KVM, Proxmox VE and VirtualBox hypervisors, while a port to Hyper-V is also available.Open vSwitch has also been integrated into various cloud computing software platforms and virtualization management systems, including OpenStack, openQRM, OpenNebula and oVirt.

The Linux kernel implementation of Open vSwitch was merged into the kernel mainline in kernel version 3.3, which was released on March 18, 2012;official Linux packages are available for Debian, Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu.As of January 2014, FreeBSD and NetBSD implementations are also available, with the NetBSD's implementation operating completely in userspace.

The majority of the Open vSwitch source code is written in platform-independent C language, which provides easy portability to various environments. The source code is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.
Features

Open vSwitch supports the following features:

    Visibility into inter-VM communication via NetFlow, sFlow(R), IPFIX, SPAN, RSPAN, and GRE-tunneled mirrors
    LACP (IEEE 802.1AX-2008)
    Standard 802.1Q VLAN model with trunking
    Multicast snooping
    IETF Auto-Attach SPBM and rudimentary required LLDP support
    BFD and 802.1ag link monitoring
    STP (IEEE 802.1D-1998) and RSTP (IEEE 802.1D-2004)
    Fine-grained QoS control
    Support for HFSC qdisc
    Per VM interface traffic policing
    NIC bonding with source-MAC load balancing, active backup, and L4 hashing
    OpenFlow protocol support (including many extensions for virtualization)
    IPv6 support
    Multiple tunneling protocols (GRE, VXLAN, STT, and Geneve, with IPsec support)
    Remote configuration protocol with C and Python bindings
    Kernel and user-space forwarding engine options
    Multi-table forwarding pipeline with flow-caching engine
    Forwarding layer abstraction to ease porting to new software and hardware platforms


Linux Plumbers Conference 
Published on Oct 8, 2013
Discussion around the use of hardware assisted filtering capabilities found in modern networking hardware to offload the filtering of packets to the hardware. http://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/2013/
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Science & Technology 
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