Linux-cp at LF Networking’s One Summit in Seattle, Washington

Netgate is looking forward to Jim Thompson’s talk, “Data Planes & Data Plane Acceleration: Linux-cp — a Linux control plane integration for FD.io VPP,” at LF Networking’s ONE Summit in Seattle, WA. The ONE Summit is a two-day conference happening from November 15 - 16 filled with in-depth presentations and interactive conversations surrounding Access, Edge, and Cloud open-source technology developments.

Linux-cp — a Linux control plane integration for FD.io VPP

In the last decade, frameworks have appeared that implement high-speed software data plane functionalities directly in userspace using kernel-bypass on commodity hardware. Vector Packet Processing (VPP) is one such framework, offering the flexibility of a modular router with the benefits provided by techniques such as batch processing that have become commonplace in high-speed networking stacks. VPP lets users arrange functions as a processing graph, providing a full-blown stack of network functions. 

LFN's FD.io VPP secure data plane project is the open-source version of Cisco's VPP secure data plane technology, found here. It is compelling but does not entirely express a ready-to-use network implementation. More work and knowledge is needed to develop a fully-featured high-speed data plane with control plane implementation. This includes integration with other open-source projects, as well as in-depth knowledge of networking concepts and implementation issues.

One thing that needs to be added has been the higher-level control plane - implementations of OSPF, RIPv2, BGP, LDP, etc. Linux-cp is a VPP plugin that creates Linux network interfaces that mirror their VPP data plane counterpart. The general model is that Linux is the network stack, i.e., it has the control plane protocols, like ARP, IPv6 ND/MLD, etc., and the VPP data plane provides a software-based ASIC for forwarding. An associated "linux_nl" plugin listens to Netlink messages and synchronizes the IP configuration of the paired interfaces. 

Jim will discuss the basic architecture of VPP and the development effort of the two plug-ins, enlightening the audience on how they may leverage linux-cp, linux-nl, VPP, and a routing agent such as Bird or FRR in their own network solution. Those interested in learning how to better access the benefits of VPP technology will benefit from Jim's presentation.

Who is Jim?

Jim Thompson, CTO of Netgate, has been noodling around the UNIX world for far too long. He knows he started with BSD Unix Release 4.0c on a Vax 11/780 in 1981. He still thinks, "echo 'This is not a pipe." | cat - /dev/tty' is funny. He submitted his first patch to a Free Software project in 1987 for a port of GNU Emacs to a Convex vector supercomputer. Patches for gcc, gas, and gdb followed. Netgate was originally the name for a stateful packet filtering firewall he wrote in 1992. 

TNSR - A High-Powered VPP Solution

TNSR is a high-performance software router based on FD.io’s Vector Packet Processing (VPP). TNSR software combines VPP’s incredible packet processing performance with Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and other open-source technologies to provide a ready-to-use router that enables businesses and service providers to address today’s edge and cloud networking needs. Learn More Here