Fast Data Project's Release 19.08 Enriches Data Plane Leadership and Deployment Efficacy

Release marks significant progression in network stack, host stack, and management capabilities which further speed packet processing and improve operational visibility

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The Linux Foundation

Sep 18, 2019, 12:13 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 18, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- FD.io ("Fido") – an open source project within the Linux Foundation's LF Networking (LFN) specifically focused on becoming the world's packet processing data plane for secure network infrastructure applications – today announced the availability of software release 19.08. The release provides significant additions and enhancements to the Vector Packet Processing's (VPP) network stack, host stack, and management infrastructure – furthering its breakthrough packet processing performance and strengthening ease of deployment and manageability.

VPP's Network Stack (VNET) provides a platform-independent subgraph for processing Layer 2 and 3 networking traffic. Release 19.08 adds the following to the network stack - speeding rule processing, cryptography, and overall network interface robustness:

L3 Cross Connect - which sends all traffic received on the input interface to requested path(s). This approach is considerably more memory efficient than using a separate IP table for each input interface, and is much faster than an ACL-based forwarding match all rule.
Updated cryptography infrastructure for modularity and performance scaling accommodating both hardware (including Intel® QuickAssist Technology) and software instruction acceleration (including the integration of Intel® Multi-buffer Crypto for IPSec library) supporting a full set of crypto algorithms
Additional network interface coverage, configuration, performance and compliance achievements:

Optimized drivers (VPP native interface: Intel AVF (Intel Fortville and Columbiaville); Mellanox RDMA/iVerb (Connect-X 4 and Connect-X 5); and VMXNet3) - providing significant performance improvement
DPDK 19.05
NUMA-aware interface bonding, local interface prioritization - which builds upon the NUMA-aware memory enhancements added in FD.io VPP 19.01
Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) bonding
Experimental support for Generic Segmentation Offload (GSO)
Tunnel/Overlay advances including IETF compliant segment routing and VXLAN-GPE performance enhancements

VPP's Host Stack provides a platform-independent subgraph for processing Layer 2 and 3 networking traffic. Release 19.08 adds the following to the network stack - speeding rule processing, cryptography, and overall network interface robustness:

FD.io VPP's host stack builds on top of the L2/L3 network stack - adding transport, session, and application-layer protocol processing nodes. Release 19.08 adds the following:

High-performance Layer 4 support for UCP, TCP, TLS and QUIC
Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) - which reduces connection and transport latency by moving endpoint congestion control algorithms out of kernel space and into user space
TCP congestion control enhancements - the addition of undo recovery, start tx, loss signal, and delivery rate estimation (the later which is useful to future planned congestion control algorithms like Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR)

Many of the above features contribute directly to ongoing FD.io VPP performance gains. Detailed performance test results associated with Release 19.08 can be viewed here (AVG) and here (TCP ).

Complementing a rich set of network and host stack improvements and additions, release 19.08 also adds new management capabilities that are key to enterprise and carrier class deployment efficacy, including:

API support for Python 3 programming
IGMP and IP traces / tracing added for improved debugging
VPP counter stats with zero-overhead counter read semantics now exposed in a shared memory segment and API
Worker thread level stat (granularity includes cycle-per-node and vector size per worker thread) in support of detailed performance introspection

Industry uptake of FD.io continues to expand through vendor solution productization and commercial network deployments:

Cisco Ultra Packet Core Solutions
Cisco® Virtual Topology System (VTS)
Cisco XRv 9000 IOS XR Based vRouter / vBNG Solution
Huachentel Virtualized CPE Solutions
Netgate TNSR Router, VPN and Firewall Solutions
Smart Access Gateway for Alibaba Cloud network products
Yahoo Japan deployment of software-based, cloud-native scalable, load balancing

"Many have worked diligently for several years now to progress FD.io to the point of commercial viability," said Jim Thompson, Netgate CTO. "Now that we are seeing mainstream network deployments, the project takes on a new level of importance. Release 19.08 is a significant stepping stone on that path."

To date, FD.io has over 15,000 commits from roughly 400 contributors working through 90 organizations - including network operators, service providers, equipment and software providers, chip vendors, integrators, and researchers - all collaborating to innovate software-based packet processing. FD.io community projects address not only VPP technology, but a diverse set of requirements and usability needs across a variety of deployment environments.

Visit with FD.io and other LF Networking projects at Open Network Summit Europe, September 23-25, 2019 in Antwerp, Belgium. Registration remains open, with Day and Hall Pass options starting at $275 US.

For more information or details on how to participate in FD.io, please visit: https://fd.io. Details on LF Networking are available here: www.lfnetworking.org.

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SOURCE The Linux Foundation