...

Loss characteristics are a topic for further investigation, and likely expansion of the ETSI NFV specification TST009, clause 11.

First tests with PROX monitoring

As a first step, PROX was started on Node 4 after reboot, with nothing else running:

Image Added There is fairly regular interrupt activity in the 5-10usec bin for all cores, but nothing in the 10-50usec range after 60 sec.

Next, the Node 4 and 5 configurations above were built (after stopping PROX on Node 4, VSPERF could not install ovs-vanilla with PROX running).

Once the Node 4 ovs-vanilla data path was instantiated by VSPERF, we re-started and viewed interrupt activity with PROX again (with no traffic running). Image Added

Then, the Node 5 iPerf3 traffic was started (after a date timestamp), and PROX counts were zeroed-out as the traffic began.  Image Added Recall the host config is  VSWITCH_VHOST_CPU_MAP = [4,5,8,11]  and here PROX observed interrupts on NUMA 0 cores 2, 7, 14, 16, 17 (many!) and 18 in the 10-50usec range. The data plane measurements indicate one second with 45 frame losses (see the very bottom of the figure). Message logging on Nodes 4 and 5 indicated nothing during the 60 sec iPerf3 test.

...

[  5]  10.00-11.00  sec  59.6 MBytes   500 Mbits/sec  0.011 ms  0/43128 (0%)

[  5]  11.00-12.00  sec  59.8 MBytes   501 Mbits/sec  0.010 ms  0/43269 (0%)

[  5]  12.00-13.00  sec  59.6 MBytes   500 Mbits/sec  0.008 ms  45/43220 (0.1%)

[  5]  13.00-14.00  sec  59.5 MBytes   499 Mbits/sec  0.018 ms  0/43068 (0%)

Next steps:

1. OVS-DPDK with isolcpu rcu_nocbs     
2. and taskset the iPerf process to qa core with no interrupts.

...