Part VII/B — NVIDIA Mellanox Bluefield-2 SmartNIC Hands-On Tutorial: To Offload or Not To Offload? Continued
We continue our quest on the offloading topic (Part VII/A) and investigate the packet processing performance with pktgen.
Architecture
For the measurements, I prepare the machines to materialize the architecture depicted below.
The setup is more or less the same we had previously. The Host on the left-hand side (let’s call it H1) runs the Bluefield-2 DPU in EMBEDDED_CPU Mode (i.e., in SmartNIC mode). It implements OvS and the whole packet processing logic on the ARM cores. On the other hand, the other Host on the right-hand side (let’s call it H2) does only utilize the SmartNIC as a NIC, i.e., the Bluefield-2 DPU is in SEPARATED_HOST Mode. This means that the packets sent to H2 are not going through the ARM cores and are “directly” processed by H2 itself.
Now, instead of running iperf3 instances, both hosts run pktgen instead.
Configuration
To run pktgen on the hosts, we have to install DPDK on the hosts themselves. It is the same installation process as we did on the SmartNICs in Part II. Let’s repeat them below assuming your DPDK file is uncompressed under /opt:
# cd /opt
# wget…
