Paxym Software Services for Multicore CPUs OCTEON XLR Freescale Rangeley QuickAssist
Software Services News & Events

Fast-Path Packet Processing: DPDK, NetMap, VPP (FDD), Intel QuickAssist -- Project Updates




DPDK, NetMap, VPP, QuickAssist are technologies used in modern Router architectures to provide accelerated software packet processing path.

Paxym's team has extensive working experience with many flavors of packet processing acceleration frameworks (aka Fast-Path). We have worked on multiple projects involving DPDK, QuickAssist and NetMap. We are also engaged with customers interested in Vector Packet Processing framework. All these are frameworks and Toolkits to provide an optimized data-path for different OS environments (Linux / FreeBSD), to help a vendor achieve many folds of performance gains.




DPDK Network Fast-Path Offload Accelerator for IPv4, v6, Firewall, NAT, IPSec, GRE, Traffic-Shaping

Paxym Inc. Team completed its Network Offload Stack for use on Intel x86 Multi-core CPUs using DPDK framework. Earlier the same Accelerator Stack was also enabled for OCTEON-III and OCTEON-TX2 Multi-core CPUs using Simple-Exec (SE, SE2) execution environments. The Stack performs majority of IPv4 and IPv6 Packet Forwarding functions as well as NAT and Firewall features. IPSec Offload is also available, which can be added as a Module to this Stack. GRE offload feature is also a module addition to the Stack. Stack has been tested and deployed with OpenWRT and VyOS Control-Planes. See here for information on the Offload Stack.

DPDK adaption of Custoer's proprietary GRE features for Fast-path Acceleration

Our team ported Customer's proprietary GRE encaps features, into a DPDK Fast-path application in User-space deployed on dedicated CPU cores. The Packet path saw a 2500% speed gain as compared to initial User-space stack. All Features and Controls were fully ported, tested with Automated Scripts, fuzz testing and High Packet rates using Traffic Generators. Allowing for a Transpare seamless switch-over on 600 Pop Nodes for Customer.

QuickAssist Drivers port to FreeBSD for Intel Rangeley series

Our Developers completed a port QuickAssist AES driver on FreeBSD 10.3 and 11.0, for use on C2000-Rangeley CPU series from Intel. The AES-CBC performance results as checked on C2358 (4-core) and C2758 (8-core) were substantially better than SW path. This is being utilized by our Customer for their FreeBSD IPSec VPNs both CPE and Concentrator.

The QuickAssist-AES driver can potentially also be used for pfSense and other firewalls based on 10.3 and higher versions.

DPDK PMD for OCTEON-III and OCTEON-TX PCIe NIC

Paxym Inc. Team is working on creating a DPDK PMD for 16-core OCTEON-III CN7360 PCIe NIC card. The PMD allows the OCTEON Card to be utilized as a slave Network Interface in DPDK Framework.. Same SW will extend support to OCTEON-III CN7240, CN7350 and OCTEON-TX2 based PCIe NIC cards as well.

DPDK UserSpace IPSec stack for FreeBSD

Our team completed a port and remap of BSD IPSec Kernel code into UserSpace. This was demonstrated to be directly usable as a DPDK application. Customer utilized it for IPSec Tunnels and Traffic generator / simulator.

Intel AES-NI (CBC/others + HMAC-SHA1) support in FreeBSD

Added AES-NI negotiation and processing routines to allow for AES-NI offload of AES + SHA1 crypto support. Implemented for FreeBSD 10.2, 11.0 on Intel CPUs with AES-NI support. Tested with direct IPSec, and L2TP-over-IPSec from Windows clients (StrongSWAN with mpd5 etc.). Allows AES-NI offload performance gains to be realized on Intel based FreeBSD machines (including pfsense). See here:

Native DPDK on OCTEON-II CN6645 Liquid-IO with 2 x 10GB Ethernet Ports

Paxym's team completed a native port of Intel® DPDK to the OCTEON-II architecture CN6645, based PCIe Liquid-IO board with 2x 10Gbps ports.

The native port allows DPDK libraries, Run-time and SW environment to be directly available on the OCTEON-II CPU natively. All Network applications, Examples, Tests etc. enjoy the benefit of accelerated throughput, seamless (almost zero code-change) migration and reduced costs for Host CPU.

Customers used the Native DPDK port as replacement for Simple-Exec based Fast-path stack.

Native DPDK on Tilera 36 core TILEncore-Gx36 with PMDs for 10GB x2 Ports

Paxym's team completed a native port of Intel® DPDK to the Tilera TILEncore-Gx36 Intelligent Application Adapter platform consisting of TILEncore Gx36 CPU with 36 cores and a 10GB Optical Port

The native port allows DPDK libraries, Run-time and SW environment to be directly available on the Tilera (non-x86) CPU directly. All Network applications, Examples, Tests etc. enjoy the benefit of accelerated throughput, seamless (zero code-change) migration and reduced costs for Host CPU.

Requesting customer used it for porting their NFV code-base and custom packet processing (LTE tunnels / traffic-gen) to Tilera architecture.

Paxym, Inc. is a Software Development and Testing Services Company. Providing Consulting Services to its Customers in the areas of Cloud Software, Web Front and Back-End Applications, Network and Security Stacks, Linux, xBSD Kernel development and Performance Tuning. Along with Solutions to a variety of computing problems using combination of SW and Hardware, by its Consultants.