Augmenting P4 Software Pipelines with Accelerators. The IPsec ... Cristian Dumitrescu & Radu Nicolau

Augmenting P4 Software Pipelines with Accelerators. The IPsec Use-case - Cristian Dumitrescu & Radu Nicolau, Intel Corporation
In this presentation, we look at the problem of augmenting the capabilities of P4 programmable pipelines though non-programmable extern blocks. While in case of HW pipelines the extern blocks are typically hardwired, for SW pipelines the extern blocks have to be designed as standalone and reusable SW modules that can be connected to the pipelines in a generic and scalable way. The SW blocks have to execute in parallel with the pipelines, leveraging the many CPU cores in the system, which implies an asynchronous communication between the pipelines and their companion extern blocks. The use-case explored in this presentation is IPsec. We show at how to the DPDK IPsec and crypto libraries are used to implement a SW module that provides IPsec support to the P4 SW pipelines. The IPsec block works as an accelerator to the pipeline with minimal impact to the pipeline programming, as the IPsec block is connected to the pipeline input/output ports through packet queues transparently to the P4 program running on the pipeline. The IPsec block provides support for the IPsec tunnel and transport modes with a large selection of cipher and hash algorithms.
Accelerating Network Performance - The most popular kit to accelerate packet processing on a wide variety of CPU architectures Designed to run on x86, POWER and ARM processors, DPDK is a set of libraries running mostly in Linux userland, with a FreeBSD port available for a subset of features. www.dpdk.org/