Contrail DPDK vRouter Support for Intel DDP Technology in Fortville NICs

In previous releases, Intel Ethernet 500 Series (Niantic Series) NICs are unable to perform load-balancing for MPLSoGRE packets as they lack in port information. Due to this, all incoming packets between a pair of compute nodes start lining up in the same hardware receiving queue (Rx) of the NIC. The vRouter performs software load-balancing by distributing the packets to other CPU cores, which processes the packets in the Rx queue. This reduces the capacity of the vRouter and affects its performance.

In release 2011, Contrail Networking uses the Intel DDP technology, which enables the Fortville NICs to perform load-balancing for the MPLSoGRE packets. The Intel DDP technology allows dynamic re-configuration of the packet processing pipeline in the NIC at runtime, without rebooting the server. Contrail Networking is configured with an MPLSoGRE profile to process the incoming packets with MPLSoGRE encapsulation. The MPLSoGRE profile enables the NIC to distribute the packets evenly across different hardware Rx queues and enables the CPU cores to perform proportionally. This increases the performance of the vRouter.

Starting from release 2011, you can use the following commands to enable, add, delete, or view the list of DDP profiles loaded in a DPDK enabled vRouter:

• The Intel DDP profile is not enabled by default in DPDK enabled vRouter. You can pass --ddp as a command line argument when the system comes up to enable DDP in DPDK enabled vRouters for Fortville NICs.

• Alternatively, during runtime you can execute the dpdkconf –ddp add command present in the contrail-tools container to enable DDP in vRouter for Fortville NICs.

• Use the dpdkconf --ddp delete command on the CLI to remove a DDP profile already loaded in the vRouter for Fortville NICs.

• Use the dpdkinfo --ddp list command on the CLI to display the list of DDP profiles loaded in the vRouter for Fortville NICs.