revisiting the open vSwitch dataplane ten years later
William Tu, Yi-Hung Wei, Gianni Antichi, Ben Pfaff
Abstract
This paper shares our experience in supporting and running the Open vSwitch (OVS) software switch, as part of the NSX product for enterprise data center virtualization used by thousands of VMware customers. Starting in 2009, the OVS design split its code between tightly coupled kernel and userspace components. This split was necessary at the time for performance, but it caused maintainability problems that persist today. In addition, in-kernel packet processing is now much slower than newer options.
Topics & Concepts
Operating systemComputer scienceMaintainabilityVirtualizationHypervisorKernel (algebra)SoftwareEmbedded systemCloud computingSoftware engineeringMathematicsCombinatoricsSoftware-Defined Networks and 5GCloud Computing and Resource ManagementSoftware System Performance and Reliability