flow-orchestrator

About

This is currently just a platform for me to learn more about DPDK and to have a foundation for some experiments. It's not really useful yet, but I will add more and more features in my free time™.

Building

Building should work with g++/clang++ as long as the version fully supports C++17.

For building you basically need to have the following things installed:

• meson
• ninja
• dpdk
• boost
• luajit
• sol2

NOTE: The dependencies must be installed in a way that meson is able to find them. In most cases this is via pkg-config

Features

• Support for dpdk eth devices
• Define packet flows with lua script executed at startup
• Packet flag extraction and flow tagging

Example of a lua script used with the lua_packet_filter packet processor assigning packets to ports (devices) by some simple rules

function process(packet)

    if packet:is_icmp() then
        logf(INFO, "pkt: src_ip = %s, dst_ip = %s, ", ipv4_to_str(packet:get_src_ipv4()), ipv4_to_str(packet:get_dst_ipv4()))
    end

    if packet:get_src_endpoint_id() == 0 then
        return 1
    else
        return 0
    end
end

With this script I achieve on my test setup up to 6.5Mpkts/sec on a single queue/core. But the current feature set is still very limited.

Whatever

Currently there are some hardcoded flags in the meson file that disable the use of avx/avx2 instructions. This is the outcome of pure laziness (one of my test servers does not support avx/avx2)

Running

Make sure everything that's needed for running DPDK apps is configured properly. This includes having some supported network interfaces bound via vfio-pci or uio_igb, hugepages being available...

I have a dual port 10G network card from Intel (X710) which is supported via the i40e driver and it's currently the only hardware I've tested.

My NIC physical functions are 0000:03:00.0, 0000:03:00.1 and the resulting command is:

./build/flow-orchestrator --devices 'eth&0000:03:00.0' 'eth&0000:03:00.1' --init-script ./test/test_flow01.lua --telemetry-interval
50 --telemetry-endpoint 'tcp://127.0.0.1:8123' -- -l 1,2,3,4

Now go and connect with a flow-orchestrator-telemetry-client instance and see some numbers rolling.