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