Evaluate secondary networks for KubeVirt VMs on OpenShift, connecting VMs via VDUSE/vhost-vdpa CNI to a podified "OVS-DPDK" userspace bridge. The setup consists of:

• Containerized OVS with DPDK enabled, running in a pod,
• Userspace OVS bridge of type netdev,
• DPDK drivers for attaching physical NICs to the OVS bridge,
• OVS VDUSE ports with vhost-vdpa char devs to provide network connectivity to KubeVirt VMs, and
• Optimized CPU affinity and cgroup v2 cpuset settings for OVS and VDUSE.

Unlike our previous PoCs (FDP-198, FDP-1285 and FDP-1286), OpenShift's primary network and OVN-Kubernetes remain unchanged.

Identify missing functionality and other shortcomings in OVS, DPDK, VDUSE and KubeVirt. The primary objective is to assess the feasibility, benefits, and costs of userspace networking for KubeVirt VMs in OpenShift. Submitting patches for upstream projects and reporting unrelated bugs are considered incidental.

Key results

• An OpenShift release image which allows to install OpenShift clusters with VDUSE-based secondary networks.
• A successful OpenShift cluster deployment with KubeVirt VMs using VDUSE-based secondary networks to connect to physical networks.
• Preliminary benchmark results for vm-to-vm-on-same-nodes and vm-to-vm-on-different-nodes scenarios on bare-metal using VDUSE-based secondary networks.