VPP/What is ODP4VPP?

Description

odp4vpp project aims to provide VPP with an additional vnet device based on OpenDataPlane (ODP is similar yet different from DPDK), with provisions for hardware acceleration of packet paths. It envisions three deployment scenarios:

• Server + NICs
• Systems on a Chip
• SmartNIC with low to very high core count

Note: OpenDataPlane [1] allow applications to build Software Defined Data Planes which means that the actual data paths can be hardware only. As an example, a packet may be autonomously received on one port, routed to a destination, tunneled in IPsec by the hardware. ODP API calls are just programming hardware blocks such as classifiers, packet schedulers, IPsec, traffic mamanager (shaping)... DPDK is a Softawre Data Plane that allow applications to access NICs in a high performance manner. When there is no hardware blocks available, software emulated blocks (classifier, scheduler...) are used: ODP then operates as a Software Dataplane, i.e. it is behaving very similarly to DPDK.

ODP has been ported to very different system architectures where packet buffers are hardware managed, CPU cores with private memory (non NUMA architectures similar to GPUs) so it is expected that vlib_buffer_t to/from odp_packet_t mapping become extremely efficient. It is expected that ODP behave as packet input and packet sink.

Scope

To produce plugin(s) to vpp to enable vpp to take advantage of ODP managed hardware.

These plugin(s) may provide additional graph nodes, rewire the VPP graph to take advantage of those graph nodes, etc via the normal vpp plugin mechanisms.