Towards a more programmable and performance-optimized Virtual Switch: Introducing P4 programmability within OVS

Abstract

Advent of network function virtualization and multiple virtual machines hosting multiple applications fueled the need for a programmable software switch that coordinates network traffic across them. Open Virtual Switch (OVS) is a software component that serves the purpose, and is it is ubiquitously deployed in the data centers. Today it is one of the key components of network infrastructure. We need a solution for efficiently offloading OVS in HW, to free up the host cores. The solution should be highly programmable and based on open standards, not constrained to work with a specific HW platform. In this paper, we will introduce a solution using P4, a domain-specific language for network packet processing.