Is it beneficial to offload OvS datapath to the hardware? Does it matter if the kernel or DPDK datapath is offloaded? In this episode, I dig a bit deeper into the OvS offloading matters, and I also explain how the packet processing is done with OvS running on the SmartNIC.

In the previous episodes, I have already been dealing with OvS and DPDK (separately) on the Bluefield-2 DPU SmartNIC; however, we did not touch upon hardware offloading at all. Let us continue our journey directly from where we stopped in Part VI., where Host1 and Host2 were running pktgen for sending and receiving packets, respectively, while the Bluefields were running an OVS instance with the default NORMAL flow rule removed and hard-coded L3-based forwarding rules were added.

Offload Packet Processing to the BlueField-2 SmartNIC

On the Bluefields, we have added some very specific Layer-3 flow rules to the OVS bridges.