Part VII/A — NVIDIA Mellanox Bluefield-2 SmartNIC Hands-On Tutorial: To Offload or Not To Offload?
Is it beneficial to offload OvS datapath to the hardware? Does it matter if the kernel or DPDK datapath is offloaded? In this episode, I dig a bit deeper into the OvS offloading matters, and I also explain how the packet processing is done with OvS running on the SmartNIC.
[UPDATE 08/2023]: I started to revise my tutorials here by reproducing them from scratch. The content below has been updated accordingly without explicitly mentioning it at every single instance.
In the previous episodes, I have already been dealing with OvS and DPDK (separately) on the Bluefield-2 DPU SmartNIC; however, we did not touch upon hardware offloading at all. Let us continue our journey directly from where we stopped in Part VI., where Host1 and Host2 were running pktgen for sending and receiving packets, respectively, while the Bluefields were running an OVS instance with the default NORMAL flow rule removed and hard-coded L3-based forwarding rules were added.
