With PoC FDP-1286 we evaluate userspace datapaths with OVS-DPDK for OpenShift's default CNI plugin OVN-Kubernetes, OpenShift's default CNI plugin. It moves container networking to userspace by replacing veth devices with VDUSE devices (FDP-1285) and moves networking of KubeVirt virtual machines to userspace with help of the vhost-vdpa protocol (FDP-1513, FDP-1514, FDP-1515). This ultimately moved the entire OpenShift networking stack to userspace.

We now aim to evaluate the performance and latency of our userspace networking stack using OVN-Kubernetes. Franck Baudin requested results for VM-to-VM traffic across bare-metal nodes: We will deploy a multi-node OpenShift (MNO) cluster on bare-metal servers, launch two VMs on separate nodes, and run benchmarks between them. We will engage QE engineers from our vDPA group to help define and run meaningful benchmarks.

Benchmarks on our bare-metal cluster (FDP-1546) are suboptimal due to nodes being connected with 1GBit/s only. Benchmarks on QE's bare-metal cluster (FDP-1618) are blocked due to Geneve tunnel offload issues on Mellanox NICs (FDP-1897). As a workaround, we will deploy and benchmark our PoC on Telco bare-metal nodes.

This does not cover the new CNI that provides only essential functionality and serves as a high-performance reference implementation for customers such as Orange (FDP-1516). Its performance and latency will be evaluated separately.

This task covers benchmarks on Telco bare-metal servers, while FDP-1546 covers benchmarks on our servers and FDP-1618 covers benchmarks on QE's servers.