So dedicated appliances are dead and all our network functions are VMs or Containers, but there’s a performance hit when going virtual as the L2 processing has to be handled by the Hypervisor before being passed onto the relevant VM / Container.

If we have a 10Gb NIC in our server, we want to achieve a 10Gbps “Line Speed” on the Network Element / VNF we’re running on.

When we talked about appliances if you purchased an P-GW with 10Gbps NIC, it was a given you could get 10Gbps through it (without DPI, etc), but when we talk about virtualized network functions / network elements there’s a very real chance you won’t achieve the “line speed” of your interfaces without some help.

When you’ve got a Network Element like a S-GW, P-GW or UPF, you want to forward packets as quickly as possible – bottlenecks here would impact the user’s achievable speeds on the network.

To speed things up there are two technologies, that if supported by your software stack and hardware, allows you to significantly increase throughput on network interfaces, DPDK & SR-IOV.

DPDK – Data Plane Development Kit

Usually *Nix OSs handle packet processing on the Kernel level. As I type this the packets being sent to this WordPress server by Firefox are being handled by the Linux 5.8.0-36-generic kernel running on my machine.

The problem is the kernel has other things to do (interrupts), meaning increased delay in processing (due to waiting for processing capability) and decreased capacity.

DPDK shunts this processing to the “user space” meaning your application (the actual magic of the VNF / Network Element) controls it.

To go back to me writing this – If Firefox and my laptop supported DPDK, then the packets wouldn’t traverse the Linux kernel at all, and Firefox would be talking directly to my NIC. (Obviously this isn’t the case…)

So DPDK increases network performance by shifting the processing of packets to the application, bypassing the kernel altogether. You are still limited by the CPU and Memory available, but with enough of each you should reach very near to line speed.

SR-IOV – Single Root Input Output Virtualization

Going back to the me writing this analogy I’m running Linux on my laptop, but let’s imagine I’m running a VM running Firefox under Linux to write this.

If that’s the case then we have an even more convolted packet processing chain!

I type the post into Firefox which sends the packets to the Linux kernel, which waits to be scheduled resources by the hypervisor, which then process the packets in the hypervisor kernel before finally making it onto the NIC.

We could add DPDK which skips some of these steps, but we’d still have the bottleneck of the hypervisor.

With PCIe passthrough we could pass the NIC directly to the VM running the Firefox browser window I’m typing this, but then we have a problem, no other VMs can access these resources.

SR-IOV provides an interface to passthrough PCIe to VMs by slicing the PCIe interface up and then passing it through.

My VM would be able to access the PCIe side of the NIC, but so would other VMs.

So that’s the short of it, SR-IOR and DPDK enable better packet forwarding speeds on VNFs.