OpenSolaris

Crossbow - Current and Future work

Key Features Integrated in Nevada build 105 (Dec 4th, 2008) and available in the next release of OpenSolaris:

• Table of Supported NIC Features

• Performance & latency improvements
  • Dynamic Polling and H/W Classification
  • HW and S/W fanouts to multiple cores
  • Parallelizing the stack all the way from HW to application
• Virtualization
  • Virtual Wire(TM) - Ability of create Network in a Box
  • NIC Virtualization - HW and S/W based VNICs
  • Etherstubs (Virtual Switches)
  • Service Virtualization - Flows
  • IP Instances for Zones
• Resource partitioning
  • Bandwidth partitioning for NICs/VNICs/Flows
  • CPU resource and priority assignment on per datalink (NIC/VNIC/Aggr) bassis
  • Class of Service support based on Diffserv tags (DSCP)
• Flows
  • Based on IP addresses, IP Subnets, Transport and ports
  • Bandwidth control and priority for Flows
• Analytics/Observability
  • Real Time usage for flows and datalinks
  • Usage history for flows and datalinks
  • Fine grained, per link statistics like packets received via
     intr/poll, chain lengths, Tx block/wakeup count etc.
    (Currently tracked by the kernel on per datalink/flow bassis
     and available from 'mdb' macros such as 'mac_flow' and 'mac_srs').

Ongoing work:

• Performance Improvement
  • Datapath streamlining (including forwarding performance)
  • NUMA awareness and thread placement
  • Aggressive leveraging HW features like L3/L4 classification
• APIs
  • Publish stable GLDv3 APIs
  • Publish MAC Client API (evolving)
  • Management libraries (libdladm and libflowadm)
  • Socket options for per connection SLA
  • PF_PACKET port to Crossbow
• Virtualization
  • Virtual Wire(TM) enhancements
  • Complete Crossbow as a common architecture for all Virtualization
  • IOV and Direct I/O
  • HW based switching
  • Finer grained control over HW resource assignment
  • Enhanced Zone integration
• Analytics/Observability/Management
  • dlstat(1M) and flowstat(1) for fine grained runtime statistics, capacity planning and network wide analysis, billing, and metering
  • Network shell - netsh(1): A network config/mgmt shell similar to used by common routers and switches

Future Work:

• Guarantees
• Dynamic resource assignment based on current usage
• Advanced NIC features like header/data split etc
• Support of Real time flows/capabilities
• Inter VNIC communication fastpath
• Deep packet inspection/classification