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Re:SmartNIC Linux router for modern data center by alex_saroyan on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @06:01PM (#30279943)
Right. We instruct Kernel to reserve 8 CPU cores exclusively for our user space application that is responsible for traffic forwarding.

Here's performance results. Max latency is 0.31 msec.

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min_latency_ns: 708

avg_latency_ns: 63723

max_latency_ns: 310795

jitter_ns: 30940

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Regarding L3 PFC support. In my understanding it's a ROCE requirement. I view RoCE as east-west traffic, since its not leaving the boundaries of the switch fabric, I think non-blocking leaf/spine fabric should be sufficient there. Please correct me if'm missing something.

SoftGate, the Linux router where we use DPDK, is designed for North/South traffic, sitting on the border of the data center, so we don't expect RoCE traffic there, but again, please let me know if you see it differently.

Re:SmartNIC Linux router for modern data center by artavazd_rk on Thursday February 10, 2022 @06:33AM (#30284822)
You have got a very good latency numbers. It's impressive.

You are right about RoCE traffic. It is mainly East-West traffic. However NTT has a project called IOWN and in the scope of that project as I know they are trying to build North-South traffic based on the RoCE technology. In the case when you will decide to use your SoftGate routers inside the datacenter it would make sense to have a multipath routing capabilities and also solution for "PFC spreading blocking problem". This problem is not particularly bound with RoCE transport layer but instead for a MPI use cases. A several big infrastructure companies built their own network transport layer and in house hardware to solve those problems.