episode-15.xml

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<item xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd">
  <title>Lagopus</title>
  <guests>Yoshihiro Nakajima from NTT</guests>
  <description>
    <p>
      <a href="http://www.lagopus.org/">Lagopus</a> is a high-performance, open
      source software switch, primarily for DPDK on Linux, developed at NTT in
      its Network Innovation Laboratories research group.  Lagopus features
      OpenFlow 1.3 conformance, plus extensions to better support NTT's use
      cases.  This episode is a discussion with Yoshihiro Nakajima, one of the
      switch's developers, about Lagopus, its history, goals, and future.
    </p>

    <p>
      Lagopus supports protocols that are particularly important to carriers,
      such as <a
      href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provider_Backbone_Bridge_Traffic_Engineering">PBB</a>
      and <a
      href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiprotocol_Label_Switching">MPLS</a>,
      and includes OpenFlow extensions for general-purpose tunnel support with
      VXLAN, GRE, and other encapsulations.  Yoshihiro talks about how, with
      DPDK, Lagopus implements some protocols, such as ARP and ICMP, by
      delegating them to the Linux kernel through <a
      href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TUN/TAP">TAP devices</a>.
    </p>

    <p>
      Yoshihiro describes the architecture of Lagopus and how it achieves high
      performance.  It has optimizations specific to the flows that each table
      is expected to contain; for example, a different lookup implementation
      for L2 and L3 tables.  We talk about how the number of tables in a given
      application affects performance.
    </p>

    <p>
      Lagopus targets two main application domains: high-performance switching
      or routing on bare-metal servers, or high-performance virtual switching
      for NFV.  Some of the latter applications are in a testing phase, aiming
      for ultimate production deployment.
    </p>

    <p>
      We discuss some philosophy of SDN (some audio was lost at the beginning
      of this discussion).  The important part of SDN, to Yoshihiro, is to
      avoid the need to use CLIs to configure switches, instead moving to a
      ``service-defined'' model.
    </p>

    <p>
      We discussed how to fit stateful services into the stateless OpenFlow
      match and action pipeline model, particularly how to handle the need for
      sequence numbers in some tunneling protocols such as GRE and GTP.
    </p>

    <p>
    </p>

    <p>
      We talk about the difficulties in forming an open source community around
      a software switch and attracting contributions from a group outside the
      immediate organization writing the software.  Yoshihiro reports receiving
      reports from several users, including suggestions for improvement.
    </p>

    <p>
      Lagopus has a growing worldwide community but some of the outreach from
      the team has focused on Asia in general and Japan in particular because
      of lower geographical and communication barriers.
    </p>

    <p>
      The Lagopus team is currently working on a switch and routing control API
      that works at a higher level than OpenFlow, based on <a
      href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YANG">YANG</a> models.
    </p>

    <p class="attribution">
      OVS Orbit is produced by <a href="mailto:blp@ovn.org">Ben Pfaff</a>.  The
      intro music in this episode is <a
      href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/AlexBeroza/43098">Drive</a>,
      featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex.  The bumper music is
      <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/speck/42100">Yeah Ant</a>
      featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck.  The outro
      music is <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Kirkoid/43005">Space
      Bazooka</a> featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid.  All content is licensed under a Creative Commons <a
      href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">Attribution 3.0
      Unported (CC BY 3.0)</a> license.
    </p>
  </description>
<pubDate>Sat, 10 Sep 2016 17:23:32 GMT</pubDate>
</item>