We continue our quest on the offloading topic (Part VII/A) and investigate the packet processing performance with pktgen.

Architecture

For the measurements, I prepare the machines to materialize the architecture depicted below.

The setup is more or less the same we had previously. The Host on the left-hand side (let’s call it H1) runs the Bluefield-2 DPU in EMBEDDED_CPU Mode (i.e., in SmartNIC mode). It implements OvS and the whole packet processing logic on the ARM cores. On the other hand, the other Host on the right-hand side (let’s call it H2) does only utilize the SmartNIC as a NIC, i.e., the Bluefield-2 DPU is in SEPARATED_HOST Mode. This means that the packets sent to H2 are not going through the ARM cores and are “directly” processed by H2 itself.