Speakers
Description
XDP already offers rich facilities for high performance packet
processing, and has seen deployment in several production systems.
However, this does not mean that XDP is a finished system; on the
contrary, improvements are being added in every release of Linux, and
rough edges are constantly being filed down. The purpose of this talk is
to discuss some of these possibilities for future improvements,
including how to address some of the known limitations of the system. We
are especially interested in soliciting feedback and ideas from the
community on the best way forward.
The issues we are planning to discuss include, but are not limited to:
-
User experience and debugging tools: How do we make it easier for
people who are not familiar with the kernel or XDP to get to grips
with the system and be productive when writing XDP programs? -
Driver support: How do we get to full support for XDP in all drivers?
Is this even a goal we should be striving for? -
Performance: At high packet rates, every micro-optimisation counts.
Things like inlining function calls in drivers are important, but also
batching to amortise fixed costs such as DMA mapping. What are the
known bottlenecks, and how do we address them? -
QoS and rate transitions: How should we do QoS in XDP? In particular,
rate transitions (where a faster link feeds into a slower) are
currently hard to deal with from XDP, and would benefit from, e.g.,
Active Queue Management (AQM). Can we adapt some of the AQM and QoS
facilities in the regular networking stack to work with XDP? Or should
we do something different? -
Accelerating other parts of the stack: Tom Herbert started the
discussion on accelerating transport protocols with XDP back in 2016.
How do we make progress on this? Or should we be doing something
different? Are there other areas where we can extend XDPs processing
model to provide useful accelerations?
