Goal: Provide a Developer Preview milestone for enabling OVN HW offloading virto/vDPA for containers instead of SR-IOV VFs (on the primary interface), on the path to full support (to follow).

Problem: Providing an open and standard interface for accessing VFs/sub function from container workloads directly to NICs/smartNICs

Why is this important?{}
The business case we are targeting is to mimic what we are currently seeing with all major Chinese cloud providers (Alibaba cloud, Tencent, Baidu, Bytedance, etc...) regarding virtio/vDPA to RH customers as well.
 
All these Chinese cloud providers are focusing on the hyperscale use case were they are offloading the storage, networking and encryption to smartNICs so only the workloads actually run on the host (their target is 10k-20K workloads per host). Given that they want a unified DP/CP both for containers and VMs, they are using virtio/vDPA (both full virtio HW offloading or with vDPA for the control plane translation).
 
The virtio/vDPA provides an open and standard interface for containers and VMs  which removes the vendor lock in. Our goal is to start with adding virtio/vDPA as a dev preview in OCP4.11 to let RH customers try this out on BF2 or connectx-6 DX cards. Looking we will also enable it on Xilinx SN1000 cards (which support virtio/vDPA) and towards the end of the year on relevant Intel NICs.
 
In OPC4.11 our focus is on supporting pods through the virtio-vDPA interface and looking forward we will also add vhost-vDPA support for CNV, kata containers and DPDK use cases (secondary interface). 
 
We have all the building blocks in RHEL8.6 and will have the relevant OVN-k8s and SRIOV device pluging changes as well on time for OCP4.11
 

Acceptance Criteria:

• Working E2E solution on BF2 and CTX-6 DX

Dependencies (internal and external): TBD

Prioritized epics + deliverables (in scope / not in scope):

Not in scope:

Estimate (XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL):  L

Previous Work:

• –

Open questions:

Epic Done Checklist:

• CI - CI Job & Automated tests: <link to CI Job & automated tests>
• Release Enablement: <link to Feature Enablement Presentation> 
• DEV - Upstream code and tests merged: <link to meaningful PR orf GitHub Issue>
• DEV - Upstream documentation merged: <link to meaningful PR or GitHub Issue>
• DEV - Downstream build attached to advisory: <link to errata>
• QE - Test plans in Polarion: <link or reference to Polarion>
• QE - Automated tests merged: <link or reference to automated tests>
• DOC - Downstream documentation merged: <link to meaningful PR>
• Notes for Done Checklist: 
  • Adding links to the above checklist with multiple teams contributing; select a meaningful reference for this Epic.
  • Checklist added to each Epic in the description, to be filled out as phases are completed - tracking progress towards "Done" for the Epic.