2023-02-08 Agenda and Minutes

Sridhar Rao Focus on completing the benchmarking activity (former Intern project)

• Student projects should help them - feed the background info along with working sessions

Where are we now, regarding the eBPF and XDP and AF_XDP (similar to SR-IOV) has CNI and Device Driver plug-in:

• Intern could not run apps on the L2 Pod, so no forwarding possible.
• Maryham - FOSDEM talk on CNDP Forwarder
• https://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2021/files/papers/3452296.3472914.pdf   is a good background paper
• Connectivity options include AF_XDP CNI, OVS with AF_XDP Module (built with the module while you build OVS or Calico), and Calico with AF_XDP Module.
• Student could build a forwarding program for the L2 Pod

Al Morton Many blocking issues with Intern, did not get to the more interesting benchmarking work.

No Orinoco Release - focus on the benchmarking instead.

@Federica might propose a student project, but need to understand the next steps first.

There are updates needed to the student project proposals from last year.

We will not participate in the LF Intern program this year.

08 Feb 2023 Invite Minh-Ngoc Tran to a future meeting, to check if our comments were adopted.

11 Jan 2023 Review with Minh-Ngoc Tran 

Draft: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-dcn-bmwg-containerized-infra-09.html

Slides: Considerations for Benchmarking Network Performance in Containerized Infrastructure  

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-dcn-bmwg-containerized-infra/

yangun@dcn.ssu.ac.kr  Sirdhar will contact.

mipearlska1307@dcn.ssu.ac.kr presented at IETF-115

Comments: ETSI TST009 scenarios were preliminary and not tested.  The draft extends these scenarios with Pod inside VM.

Sridhar Rao Tested many similar scenarios - performance difference among with VM and without VM is negligible. Not really necessary to test.  Minh needs to check this with colleagues  Sridhar will share our teams results - part of Daniele's work.  The reason people run VMs is for security reasons and resource isolation -WHEN Containers did not supply.

Parameters section: Cannot use a CNI independent of the Networking model (SRIOV or user space determines this)

Some Networking models listed are not relevant when performance is the priority. Are these even applicable when performance matters? maybe not.  For example, their networking model includes Kernel space switching will perform poorly. Minh replies that ALL the Models are included.  Need to categorize into good/bad perf.  Minh agrees.

Performance Impacts:  Major example is Number of Cores, which is not included in the Draft.  Please add this.  Minh agrees.

Section 3 clarify the use of Containers and Pods - used interchangeably now. need to clarify

Section 3 Some generalizations about CNI are not correct - Some CNI do not use user namespace

Figure 1 What is Container Engine?  is it Container Run-time. 

4.2 Some duplication on Container Network Plugin? Agree.  Can use different CNI with same network Model - no difference. The SR-IOV networking model would make a big difference with other models, but CNI not so much.  The Vswitch and the Networking model are closely tied together (Models with VPP are not possible with OVS, for example).

Section 4.3 CNI does not create it's own switch functions   Also, which of 5 networking models does Calico fall. Figures in Section 4.3.  Normal Calico does not use eBPF  Calico should fall in section 4.3.1 figure, but needs to be fixed. (remove "VSwitch")  and add Kernel routing tables in the user space vswitch block.

There was a Cillium eBPF scenario that was in the slides - this is not possible with the traffic gen and DPDK.

Intern Update  

11 Jan 2023 

has connectivity working - should be finished by tomorrow.

author of eBPF bridge says has same problem. 

Need to use Ansible for automation-this is key.  There were some version issues, need older version? 

Plan is to Finish-up by Friday 13 Jan 2023 . We hope it will go well for you!

Tim Gresham asks for resolution on this.

If we can get it, do we want it?  No good without license!  So, is a license still valid or available for update?

THEN - need to ship and install in UNH, get working there - IXIA help  to do this.

04 May 2022 

Trevor Cooper says connected and powered on, but we still might have a license issue. Need Pierre's help.

11 May 2022 this activity seems to have stalled ...

Tasks 1, 3, and 4have been completed/merged. Not doing 2.  DONE