Day 2 / Track 1 / Talk 6
Talk – Nuts-n-Bolts: Veth XDP: XDP for containers
Speakers: Toshiaki Makita and William Tu
Report by: Anjali Singhai

This talk was about XDP for containers. It begun with a description about what the XDP is and then went on to discuss the generic vs native. The question raised by the presenter was that since performance wise there is little difference, what is then the point of doing native XDP for veth? 

The presenter made several points, such as XDP_REDIRECT (can be done without allocating skb_buff, using xdp_frame), no requirement to allocation/free of additional meta data buffer, native redirect converted to xdp_buff has very low overhead.

The generic from stack converting to skb to xdp_buff has high overhead.

Several use case were described. First XDP in containers, where a container can install its own XDP program and use container to container using xdp_redirect. Second was program chaining where a program can be called from another program.

The design was focused on Veth native XDP added rx queues and NAPI handler which avoided infinite loop and stack overflow due to misconfigured XDP_redirect chain.

Site: https://www.netdevconf.info/0x13/session.html?talk-veth-xdp