DPDK Summit APAC 2024

In switchdev mode, the DPDK application manages the proxy (PF) port and VF/SF by using representors. When a packet has no matching rule in HW, it is considered a miss packet and will be sent to the port representor that matches the origin port of the packet. With HW advancements supporting hundreds of VMs and frameworks like Kubernetes that can scale to thousands of pods, the number of ports has increased significantly. The model where each VF/SF port is managed by a corresponding software representor can no longer handle such demand effectively. It consumes a lot of memory, and the software poll all ports, wasting cycles on empty queues, and causing cache misses. It also takes a long time to initialize and set up. RTE_ETH_DEV_CAPA_RXQ_SHARE was introduced earlier to mitigate this issue, but users still need to configure and setup the queues per port. The new model allows a user to configure the Rx/Tx queue on a proxy port and manage all pkts through the proxy port’s Rx/Tx queue and a single switch representor for handling miss traffic. This approach solves the scaling issue, allowing the management of thousands of ports effectively and using CPU cycles much more efficiently.