Dataplane Service

Overview

Dataplane Service in short form dp-service is a L3 virtual router with basic L2 capabilites and with IP in IPv6 tunneling for the uplink traffic. It uses SRIOV based Virtual Functions as its virtual ports. A virtual machine or a bare metal machine (In case dp-service running directly on SmartNIC) can be plugged to SRIOV VFs.

• It can operate in offloaded and non-offloaded mode.

  • Offload mode means first packet of each flow flowing over dp-service will be handled in software and then the flow will be offloaded to the hardware. (Using DPDK rte_flow)
  • Non-offloaded mode handles the whole traffic in software using PMD drivers and dedicated CPU cores.

• Uses DPDK Graph Framework for the data plane.

• rte_flow offloading between the Virtual Machines(VMs) on a single hypervisor and ip in ipv6 decap/encap offloading between hypervisors.

• GRPC support to add virtual network interfaces and routes. There is a C++ based GRPC test client (CLI) which can connect to the GRPC server. See the examples under docs.

• There is also a golang based GRPC client which is easier to used.

• A kubernetes controller abstraction on top of the provided GRPC interface is availiable as well. It is called metalnet.

• DHCPv4, DHCPv6, Neighbour Discovery, ARP protocols supported (Sub-set implementations.).

• IPv4 and limited IPv6 overlay support.

• Virtual IP support for the virtual network interfaces.

• Loadbalancer support.

• Horizantally scalable NAT Gateway support.

• Automated test support with pytest and scapy.

Installation, using and developing

For more details please refer to documentation folder docs

Contributing

We`d love to get a feedback from you. Please report bugs, suggestions or post question by opening a Github issue

License

Apache License 2.0