Introduction

Feature Overview

The OVS flow table NIC acceleration solution leverages the SmartNIC Open vSwitch flow table offloading solution to offload the datapath forwarding path in the system kernel mode to SmartNICs. The table lookup process of the original kernel-mode software is replaced by the table lookup process of the NIC hardware, which accelerates the flow table lookup speed and improves the packet forwarding performance.

The OVS flow table NIC acceleration solution is implemented based on Single-Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV). SR-IOV comprises physical functions (PFs) and virtual functions (VFs). It allows a physical device to provide multiple virtual functions, reducing the hardware cost of each additional function.

To use the hardware acceleration feature, you need to configure and enable SR-IOV.

This document describes how to deploy and verify the Mellanox ConnectX-5 NIC on the Kunpeng platform that features OVS flow table NIC acceleration.

Release Notes

This feature is released with Kunpeng Computing DC Solution 20.0.3.

Command Conventions

• Unless otherwise specified, all the commands described in this document are the same on openEuler 20.03 and CentOS 7.6.
• Unless otherwise specified, all operations described in this document must be performed on both hosts.
• In the examples described in this document, the Mellanox PF network port name is enp1s0f0/1, the VF port number is enp1s0f0_$, and the PCI port number is 0000:01:00/1.$. Replace them with the actual values to match your configuration.