Hardware support for Open vSwitch

How to Port Open vSwitch to New Software or Hardware describes the steps needed to port the Open vSwitch onto different hardware and software platforms.  Porting Open vSwitch to different platforms is relatively straightforward since the bulk of the code resides in user space with a minimal set of functions critical to performance implemented in the kernel (or in hardware).

Porting the Open vSwitch sFlow function to hardware switch platforms is straightforward since merchant switch silicon typically contains the hardware counters and packet sampling capabilities needed to implement sFlow.

Implementing the following functions in the Open vSwitch datapath provider API (see  lib/dpif-provider.h) allows the sampling hardware to be configured:

/* Retrieves 'dpif''s sFlow sampling probability into '*probability'.
 * Return value is 0 or a positive errno value.  EOPNOTSUPP indicates that
 * the datapath does not support sFlow, as does a null pointer.
 *
 * '*probability' is expressed as the number of packets out of UINT_MAX to
 * sample, e.g. probability/UINT_MAX is the probability of sampling a given
 * packet. */
 int (*get_sflow_probability)(const struct dpif *dpif,
                               uint32_t *probability);
 
/* Sets 'dpif''s sFlow sampling probability to 'probability'.  Return value
 * is 0 or a positive errno value.  EOPNOTSUPP indicates that the datapath
 * does not support sFlow, as does a null pointer.
 *
 * 'probability' is expressed as the number of packets out of UINT_MAX to
 * sample, e.g. probability/UINT_MAX is the probability of sampling a given
 * packet. */
 int (*set_sflow_probability)(struct dpif *dpif, uint32_t probability);

Packet samples are passed from the hardware up to user space as part of the datapath function (see datapath/datapath.h):

/**
 * struct dp_upcall - metadata to include with a packet to send to userspace
 * @cmd: One of %ODP_PACKET_CMD_*.
 * @key: Becomes %ODP_PACKET_ATTR_KEY.  Must be nonnull.
 * @userdata: Becomes %ODP_PACKET_ATTR_USERDATA if nonzero.
 * @sample_pool: Becomes %ODP_PACKET_ATTR_SAMPLE_POOL if nonzero.
 * @actions: Becomes %ODP_PACKET_ATTR_ACTIONS if nonnull.
 * @actions_len: Number of bytes in @actions.
 */
 struct dp_upcall_info {
         u8 cmd;
         const struct sw_flow_key *key;
         u64 userdata;
         u32 sample_pool;
         const struct nlattr *actions;
         u32 actions_len;
 };

The user space sFlow agent periodically retrieves standard interface counters using the netdev provider interface (see lib/netdev-provider.h):

/* Retrieves current device stats for 'netdev' into 'stats'.
 *
 * A network device that supports some statistics but not others, it should
 * set the values of the unsupported statistics to all-1-bits
 * (UINT64_MAX). */
 int (*get_stats)(const struct netdev *netdev, struct netdev_stats *);

The article, OpenFlow and sFlow, describes how the two technologies combine to provide the visibility and control needed to manage network performance. In the server virtualization space, support for the Open vSwitch in network adapters, offers a way to deliver hardware acceleration while still providing the visibility and control of OpenFlow and sFlow.