research-article

Building an Extensible Open vSwitch Datapath

Authors:

Justin PettitAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Volume 51, Issue 1

Pages 72 - 77

https://doi.org/10.1145/3139645.3139657

Published: 11 September 2017 Publication History

Abstract

The virtual switch is the cornerstone of the today's virtualized data center. As all traffic to and from virtual machines or containers must pass through a vSwitch, it is the ideal location for network configuration and policy enforcement.

The bulk of Open vSwitch functionality is platform-agnostic and portable. However the datapath, which touches every packet, is unique to each supported platform. Maintaining each datapath requires duplicated effort and the result has been inconsistent support of features across platforms. Even on a single platform, the features supported by a particular kernel version can vary. Further, datapath functionality must be broadly useful which prevents having application-specific features in the fast path.

eBPF, extended Berkeley Packet Filter, enables userspace applications to customize and extend the Linux kernel's functionality. It provides flexible platform abstractions for network functions, and is being ported to a variety of platforms. This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of an eBPF-based extensible OVS datapath. The eBPF OVS datapath delivers the equivalent functionality of the existing OVS kernel datapath, while significantly reducing development pain points around maintainability and extensibility. We demonstrate that these benefits don't necessarily have a trade off in regards to performance, with the eBPFbased datapath showing negligible overhead compared to the existing kernel datapath.

References

[1]

IO Visor Project. https://www.iovisor.org/, 2016.

[2]

Zaafar Ahmed, Muhammad Hamad Alizai, and Affan A Syed. Inkev: In-kernel distributed network virtualization for dcn. ACM SIGCOMM CCR, 2016.

[3]

BCC Authors. BCC - tools for bpf-based linux io analysis, networking, monitoring, and more. https://github.com/iovisor/bcc, 2016.

[4]

Cilium Authors. BPF and XDP for containers. https://github.com/cilium/cilium, 2016.

[5]

Andrew Begel, Steven McCanne, and Susan L Graham. Bpf+: Exploiting global data-flow optimization in a generalized packet filter architecture. In ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, volume 29, pages 123--134. ACM, 1999.

Digital Library

[6]

A.; Borkmann, D.; Starovoitov and H. F. Sowa. bpf: add support for persistent maps/progs. In Linux kernel, commit b2197755b263., 2015.

[7]

D. Borkmann. bpf: avoid stack copy and use skb ctx for event output. In Linux kernel, commit 555c8a8623a3., 2016.

[8]

D. Borkmann. bpf: direct packet write and access for helpers for clsact progs. In Linux kernel, commit 36bbef52c7eb., 2016.

[9]

D. Borkmann and A. Starovoitov. bpf: add event output helper for notifications/ sampling/logging. In Linux kernel, commit bd570ff970a5., 2016.

[10]

Daniel Borkmann. Advanced programmability and recent updates with tc's cls bpf. NetDev 1.2, 2016.

[11]

Daniel Borkmann. On getting tc classifier fully programmable with cls bpf. NetDev 1.1, 2016.

[12]

Pat Bosshart, Dan Daly, Glen Gibb, Martin Izzard, Nick McKeown, Jennifer Rexford, Cole Schlesinger, Dan Talayco, Amin Vahdat, George Varghese, et al. P4: Programming protocol-independent packet processors. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 44(3):87--95, 2014.

Digital Library

[13]

Jonathan Corbet. Extending extended bpf. https://lwn.net/Articles/603983/, 2014.

[14]

Changhoon Kim, Anirudh Sivaraman, Naga Katta, Antonin Bas, Advait Dixit, and Lawrence J Wobker. In-band network telemetry via programmable dataplanes. In ACM SIGCOMM, 2015.

[15]

Steven McCanne and Van Jacobson. The bsd packet filter: A new architecture for user-level packet capture. In USENIX winter, volume 46, 1993.

Digital Library

[16]

Paul E. McKenney, Jonathan Appavoo, Andi Kleen, Orran Krieger, Rusty Russell, Dipankar Sarma, and Maneesh Soni. Read-copy update. In Ottawa Linux Symposium Conference Proceedings, page 175. Ottawa Linux Symposium, 2001.

[17]

Justin Pettit, Ben Pfaff, Joe Stringer, Cheng-Chun Tu, Brenden Blanco, and Alex Tessmer. Bringing platform harmony to VMware NSX. In ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, 2017.

[18]

Jiří Pírko and Red Hat. Implementing open vswitch datapath using tc. Proceedings of Netdev 0.1, 2015.

[19]

Fulvio Risso and Politecnico di Torino Matteo Bertrone. Coupling the flexibility of ovn with the efficiency of iovisor: Architecture and demo. OVS Fall Conference, 2016.

[20]

Jamal Hadi Salim. Linux traffic control classifier-action subsystem architecture.

[21]

Muhammad Shahbaz, Sean Choi, Ben Pfaff, Changhoon Kim, Nick Feamster, Nick McKeown, and Jennifer Rexford. Pisces: A programmable, protocol-independent software switch. In Proceedings of the 2016 conference on ACM SIGCOMM 2016 Conference, pages 525--538. ACM, 2016.

Digital Library

[22]

A. Starovoitov. net: filter: x86: internal bpf jit. In Linux kernel, commit 622582786c9e., 2014d.

[23]

A. Starovoitov. bpf: allow bpf programs to tail-call other bpf programs. In Linux kernel, commit 04fd61ab36ec., 2015a.

[24]

A. Starovoitov. bpf: direct packet access. In Linux kernel, commit 969bf05eb3ce., 2016.

[25]

Xi Wang, David Lazar, Nickolai Zeldovich, Adam Chlipala, and Zachary Tatlock. Jitk: A trustworthy in-kernel interpreter infrastructure. In 11th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 14), pages 33--47, 2014.

Digital Library

Cited By

Caldare ALeonardi LMiano SProcissi GAntichi GLettieri G(2024)Rethinking Cloud Network Stacks with Switch Bypass2024 IEEE 25th International Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR)10.1109/HPSR62440.2024.10635954(55-60)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/HPSR62440.2024.10635954
Kahlhofer MRass S(2024)Application Layer Cyber Deception Without Developer Interaction2024 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW)10.1109/EuroSPW61312.2024.00053(416-429)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSPW61312.2024.00053
Song LLi J(2024)eBPF: Pioneering Kernel Programmability and System Observability - Past, Present, and Future Insights2024 3rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Computer Information Technology (AICIT)10.1109/AICIT62434.2024.10730620(1-10)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/AICIT62434.2024.10730620
Show More Cited By

Building an Extensible Open vSwitch Datapath
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains

Recommendations

revisiting the open vSwitch dataplane ten years later
SIGCOMM '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Conference

This paper shares our experience in supporting and running the Open vSwitch (OVS) software switch, as part of the NSX product for enterprise data center virtualization used by thousands of VMware customers. Starting in 2009, the OVS design split its ...
RFC 7047: The Open vSwitch Database Management Protocol
Effects of Virtualization on Network and Processor Performance Using Open vSwitch and Xen Server
UCC '14: Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE/ACM 7th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is based on virtualization, where a single physical resource is virtualized into multiple virtual resources. Processor and network virtualization offer many advantages like saving in hardware cost, energy consumption, human effort and ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Volume 51, Issue 1

Special Topics

August 2017

123 pages

ISSN:0163-5980

DOI:10.1145/3139645

Editors:
Mark Silberstein
Technion, Hafia, Israel
,
Christopher J. Rossbach
Stop D9500, Austin, TX

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2017 Authors.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 11 September 2017

Published in SIGOPS Volume 51, Issue 1

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

21
Total Citations
View Citations
675
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)39
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4

Reflects downloads up to 07 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Caldare ALeonardi LMiano SProcissi GAntichi GLettieri G(2024)Rethinking Cloud Network Stacks with Switch Bypass2024 IEEE 25th International Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR)10.1109/HPSR62440.2024.10635954(55-60)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/HPSR62440.2024.10635954
Kahlhofer MRass S(2024)Application Layer Cyber Deception Without Developer Interaction2024 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW)10.1109/EuroSPW61312.2024.00053(416-429)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSPW61312.2024.00053
Song LLi J(2024)eBPF: Pioneering Kernel Programmability and System Observability - Past, Present, and Future Insights2024 3rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Computer Information Technology (AICIT)10.1109/AICIT62434.2024.10730620(1-10)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/AICIT62434.2024.10730620
Mayer ABracciale LLungaroni PSidoretti GSalsano SBianchi GLoreti P(2023)Composing eBPF Programs Made Easy With HIKe and eCLATIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2023.332562421:2(1359-1371)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TNSM.2023.3325624
Mayer ABracciale LLungaroni PLoreti PSalsano SBianchi G(2022)eBPF Programming Made Easy with eCLATProceedings of the 18th International Conference on Network and Service Management10.5555/3581644.3581674(1-9)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3581644.3581674
Mayer ABracciale LLungaroni PLoreti PSalsano SBianchi G(2022)eBPF Programming Made Easy with eCLAT2022 18th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM)10.23919/CNSM55787.2022.9964569(28-36)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.23919/CNSM55787.2022.9964569
Osiński TPalimąka JKossakowski MTran FBonfoh ETarasiuk HBianchi GMei A(2022)A novel programmable software datapath for software-defined networkingProceedings of the 18th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies10.1145/3555050.3569117(245-260)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3555050.3569117
Zhang XSalamatian KXie G(2022)Improving Open Virtual Switch Performance Through Tuple Merge Relaxation in Software Defined NetworksIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2022.315559219:3(2078-2091)Online publication date: Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2022.3155592
Osinski TTarasiuk HChaignon PKossakowski M(2021)A Runtime-Enabled P4 Extension to the Open vSwitch Packet Processing PipelineIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2021.305590018:3(2832-2845)Online publication date: Sep-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2021.3055900
Vieira MCastanho MPacífico RSantos EJúnior EVieira L(2020)Fast Packet Processing with eBPF and XDPACM Computing Surveys10.1145/337103853:1(1-36)Online publication date: 6-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3371038
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Issue’s Table of Contents