LPC2019 - XDP: the Distro View
Channel: Linux Plumbers Conference
Date: 2019-11-18

XDP: the Distro View

Speakers
 Jiri Benc (Red Hat)
Dr Toke Høiland-Jørgensen (RedHat)
 Jesper Dangaard Brouer (Red Hat)

Description
It goes without saying that XDP is wanted more and more by everyone. Of course, the Linux distributions want to bring to users what they want and need. Even better if it can be delivered in a polished package with as few surprises as possible: receiving bug reports stemming from users' misunderstanding and from their wrong expectations does not make good experience neither for the users nor for the distro developers.

XDP presents interesting challenges to distros: from the initial enablement (what config options to choose) and security considerations, through user supportability (packets "mysteriously" disappearing, tcpdump not seeing everything), through future extension (what happens after XDP is embraced by different tools, some of those being part of the distro, how that should interact with users' XDP programs?), to more high level questions, such as user perception ("how comes my super-important use case cannot be implemented using XDP?").

Some of those challenges are long solved, some are in progress or have good workarounds, some of them are yet unsolved. Some of those are solely the distro's responsibility, some of them need to be addressed upstream. The talk will present the challenges of enabling XDP in a distro. While it will also mention the solved ones, its main focus are the problems currently unsolved or in progress. We'll present some ideas and welcome discussion about possible solutions using the current infrastructure and about future directions.