Hi Matt,

To follow up with the performance concern of (kernel-space) conntrack used in option #3. I’ve checked and evaluated the user-space conntrack functionality in OVS and in Neutron native OVS firewall.

Please kindly see the attached report for details. We can have another sync in the stx-networking weekly meeting later.

Thanks!

BR,

Kailun

From: Peters, Matt [mailto:Matt.Peters@windriver.com]
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2018 6:41 PM
To: Qin, Kailun <kailun.qin@intel.com>; starlingx-discuss@lists.starlingx.io
Subject: Re: Questions about StarlingX OVS-DPDK firewall driver enhancement

Hello Kailun,

I’m fine with exploring option #3 as an alternative to #2.  I wasn’t aware that the native driver fully supported the netdev datapath, but if it can be supported, then I agree it would be a better choice.   

Regards, Matt

From: "Qin, Kailun" <kailun.qin@intel.com>
Date: Thursday, September 6, 2018 at 10:09 AM
To: "Peters, Matt" <Matt.Peters@windriver.com>, "starlingx-discuss@lists.starlingx.io" <starlingx-discuss@lists.starlingx.io>
Subject: Questions about StarlingX OVS-DPDK firewall driver enhancement

Hi Matt,

We are doing some ground work for https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/story/2002944 regarding the StarlingX OVS-DPDK firewall driver enhancement. To better understand the requirement, we may need your help on the following question.

There are 3 security group implementations in neutron OVS-DPDK agent.

1. Iptables based security group
   The OVS agent and Compute service use a Linux bridge between each instance (VM) and the OVS integration bridge br-int to implement security groups. This implementation is stateful but
   cause scalability and performance problems.
2. Openflow based security group
   This implementation is stateless and based in OpenFlow 'learn action', which uses a firewall driver in networking-ovs-dpdk project.
   https://github.com/openstack/networking-ovs-dpdk/blob/master/networking_ovs_dpdk/agent/ovs_dpdk_firewall.py
3. Openflow + conntrack based security group
   This implementation is stateful, which uses a native firewall driver.
   https://docs.openstack.org/newton/networking-guide/config-ovsfwdriver.html
   http://docs.openvswitch.org/en/latest/tutorials/ovs-conntrack/

The requirement from the enhancement description is that we're going to adopt implementation option 2 for StarlingX OVS-DPDK security group.
Compared with option 3 which is stateful and uses a native firewall driver, what is our consideration on taking option 2 as our target?

Please kindly see the attached doc for further details. Just let me know if anything unclear. Thanks a lot!

BR,

Kailun