The locking strategy of OVS kernel module is simple: Pretty much all commands take the ovs_mutex and RTNL is nested inside it.

If RTNL is very contended, specially on big systems, pressure on the RTNL can be transferred to the ovs_mutex, affecting the datapath and the entire OVS operation.

The goal of this investigation spike is to look into improving the OVS locking (e.g: move some commands to rcu, use independent lock for flow-related cmds, etc).