4 Tested Physical Topologies
5 --------------------------
7 CSIT VPP performance tests are executed on physical baremetal servers hosted by
8 LF FD.io project. Testbed physical topology is shown in the figure below.
12 +------------------------+ +------------------------+
14 | +------------------+ | | +------------------+ |
16 | | <-----------------> | |
17 | | DUT1 | | | | DUT2 | |
18 | +--^---------------+ | | +---------------^--+ |
21 +------------------------+ +------------------^-----+
26 +------------------> TG <------------------+
30 SUT1 and SUT2 are two System Under Test servers (Cisco UCS C240, each with two
31 Intel XEON CPUs), TG is a Traffic Generator (TG, another Cisco UCS C240, with
32 two Intel XEON CPUs). SUTs run VPP SW application in Linux user-mode as a
33 Device Under Test (DUT). TG runs TRex SW application as a packet Traffic
34 Generator. Physical connectivity between SUTs and to TG is provided using
35 different NIC models that need to be tested for performance. Currently
36 installed and tested NIC models include:
38 #. 2port10GE X520-DA2 Intel.
39 #. 2port10GE X710 Intel.
40 #. 2port10GE VIC1227 Cisco.
41 #. 2port40GE VIC1385 Cisco.
42 #. 2port40GE XL710 Intel.
44 From SUT and DUT perspective, all performance tests involve forwarding packets
45 between two physical Ethernet ports (10GE or 40GE). Due to the number of
46 listed NIC models tested and available PCI slot capacity in SUT servers, in
47 all of the above cases both physical ports are located on the same NIC. In
48 some test cases this results in measured packet throughput being limited not
49 by VPP DUT but by either the physical interface or the NIC capacity.
51 Going forward CSIT project will be looking to add more hardware into FD.io
52 performance labs to address larger scale multi-interface and multi-NIC
53 performance testing scenarios.
55 For test cases that require DUT (VPP) to communicate with VM(s) over vhost-user
56 interfaces, N of VM instances are created on SUT1 and SUT2. For N=1 DUT (VPP)
57 forwards packets between vhostuser and physical interfaces. For N>1 DUT (VPP) a
58 logical service chain forwarding topology is created on DUT (VPP) by applying L2
59 or IPv4/IPv6 configuration depending on the test suite.
60 DUT (VPP) test topology with N VM instances
61 is shown in the figure below including applicable packet flow thru the DUTs and
62 VMs (marked in the figure with ``***``).
66 +-------------------------+ +-------------------------+
67 | +---------+ +---------+ | | +---------+ +---------+ |
68 | | VM[1] | | VM[N] | | | | VM[1] | | VM[N] | |
69 | | ***** | | ***** | | | | ***** | | ***** | |
70 | +--^---^--+ +--^---^--+ | | +--^---^--+ +--^---^--+ |
71 | *| |* *| |* | | *| |* *| |* |
72 | +--v---v-------v---v--+ | | +--v---v-------v---v--+ |
73 | | * * * * |*|***********|*| * * * * | |
74 | | * ********* ***<-|-----------|->*** ********* * | |
75 | | * DUT1 | | | | DUT2 * | |
76 | +--^------------------+ | | +------------------^--+ |
78 | *| SUT1 | | SUT2 |* |
79 +-------------------------+ +-------------------------+
84 *+--------------------> TG <--------------------+*
85 **********************| |**********************
88 For VM tests, packets are switched by DUT (VPP) multiple times: twice for a
89 single VM, three times for two VMs, N+1 times for N VMs.
91 throughput rates measured by TG and listed in this report must be multiplied
92 by (N+1) to represent the actual DUT aggregate packet forwarding rate.
94 Note that reported VPP performance results are specific to the SUTs tested.
95 Current LF FD.io SUTs are based on Intel XEON E5-2699v3 2.3GHz CPUs. SUTs with
96 other CPUs are likely to yield different results. A good rule of thumb, that
97 can be applied to estimate VPP packet thoughput for Phy-to-Phy (NIC-to-NIC,
98 PCI-to-PCI) topology, is to expect the forwarding performance to be
99 proportional to CPU core frequency, assuming CPU is the only limiting factor
100 and all other SUT parameters equivalent to FD.io CSIT environment. The same rule
101 of thumb can be also applied for Phy-to-VM-to-Phy (NIC-to-VM-to-NIC) topology,
102 but due to much higher dependency on intensive memory operations and
103 sensitivity to Linux kernel scheduler settings and behaviour, this estimation
104 may not always yield good enough accuracy.
106 For detailed LF FD.io test bed specification and physical topology please refer
107 to `LF FDio CSIT testbed wiki page
108 <https://wiki.fd.io/view/CSIT/CSIT_LF_testbed>`_.
110 Performance Tests Coverage
111 --------------------------
113 Performance tests are split into the two main categories:
115 - Throughput discovery - discovery of packet forwarding rate using binary search
116 in accordance to RFC2544.
118 - NDR - discovery of Non Drop Rate packet throughput, at zero packet loss;
119 followed by one-way packet latency measurements at 10%, 50% and 100% of
120 discovered NDR throughput.
121 - PDR - discovery of Partial Drop Rate, with specified non-zero packet loss
122 currently set to 0.5%; followed by one-way packet latency measurements at
123 100% of discovered PDR throughput.
125 - Throughput verification - verification of packet forwarding rate against
126 previously discovered throughput rate. These tests are currently done against
127 0.9 of reference NDR, with reference rates updated periodically.
129 CSIT |release| includes following performance test suites, listed per NIC type:
131 - 2port10GE X520-DA2 Intel
133 - **L2XC** - L2 Cross-Connect switched-forwarding of untagged, dot1q, dot1ad
134 VLAN tagged Ethernet frames.
135 - **L2BD** - L2 Bridge-Domain switched-forwarding of untagged Ethernet frames
136 with MAC learning; disabled MAC learning i.e. static MAC tests to be added.
137 - **IPv4** - IPv4 routed-forwarding.
138 - **IPv6** - IPv6 routed-forwarding.
139 - **IPv4 Scale** - IPv4 routed-forwarding with 20k, 200k and 2M FIB entries.
140 - **IPv6 Scale** - IPv6 routed-forwarding with 20k, 200k and 2M FIB entries.
141 - **VMs with vhost-user** - virtual topologies with 1 VM and service chains
142 of 2 VMs using vhost-user interfaces, with VPP forwarding modes incl. L2
143 Cross-Connect, L2 Bridge-Domain, VXLAN with L2BD, IPv4 routed-forwarding.
144 - **COP** - IPv4 and IPv6 routed-forwarding with COP address security.
145 - **iACL** - IPv4 and IPv6 routed-forwarding with iACL address security.
146 - **LISP** - LISP overlay tunneling for IPv4-over-IPv4, IPv6-over-IPv4,
147 IPv6-over-IPv6, IPv4-over-IPv6 in IPv4 and IPv6 routed-forwarding modes.
148 - **VXLAN** - VXLAN overlay tunnelling integration with L2XC and L2BD.
149 - **QoS Policer** - ingress packet rate measuring, marking and limiting
151 - **CGNAT** - Carrier Grade Network Address Translation tests with varying
152 number of users and ports per user.
154 - 2port40GE XL710 Intel
156 - **L2XC** - L2 Cross-Connect switched-forwarding of untagged Ethernet frames.
157 - **L2BD** - L2 Bridge-Domain switched-forwarding of untagged Ethernet frames
159 - **IPv4** - IPv4 routed-forwarding.
160 - **IPv6** - IPv6 routed-forwarding.
161 - **VMs with vhost-user** - virtual topologies with 1 VM and service chains
162 of 2 VMs using vhost-user interfaces, with VPP forwarding modes incl. L2
163 Cross-Connect, L2 Bridge-Domain, VXLAN with L2BD, IPv4 routed-forwarding.
164 - **IPSec** - IPSec encryption with AES-GCM, CBC-SHA1 ciphers, in combination
165 with IPv4 routed-forwarding.
166 - **IPSec+LISP** - IPSec encryption with CBC-SHA1 ciphers, in combination
167 with LISP-GPE overlay tunneling for IPv4-over-IPv4.
169 - 2port10GE X710 Intel
171 - **L2BD** - L2 Bridge-Domain switched-forwarding of untagged Ethernet frames
173 - **VMs with vhost-user** - virtual topologies with 1 VM using vhost-user
174 interfaces, with VPP forwarding modes incl. L2 Bridge-Domain.
176 - 2port10GE VIC1227 Cisco
178 - **L2BD** - L2 Bridge-Domain switched-forwarding of untagged Ethernet frames
181 - 2port40GE VIC1385 Cisco
183 - **L2BD** - L2 Bridge-Domain switched-forwarding of untagged Ethernet frames
186 Execution of performance tests takes time, especially the throughput discovery
187 tests. Due to limited HW testbed resources available within FD.io labs hosted
188 by Linux Foundation, the number of tests for NICs other than X520 (a.k.a.
189 Niantic) has been limited to few baseline tests. Over time we expect the HW
190 testbed resources to grow, and will be adding complete set of performance
191 tests for all models of hardware to be executed regularly and(or)
194 Performance Tests Naming
195 ------------------------
197 CSIT |release| follows a common structured naming convention for all
198 performance and system functional tests, introduced in CSIT |release-1|.
200 The naming should be intuitive for majority of the tests. Complete
201 description of CSIT test naming convention is provided on `CSIT test naming wiki
202 <https://wiki.fd.io/view/CSIT/csit-test-naming>`_.
204 Here few illustrative examples of the new naming usage for performance test
207 #. **Physical port to physical port - a.k.a. NIC-to-NIC, Phy-to-Phy, P2P**
209 - *PortNICConfig-WireEncapsulation-PacketForwardingFunction-
210 PacketProcessingFunction1-...-PacketProcessingFunctionN-TestType*
211 - *10ge2p1x520-dot1q-l2bdbasemaclrn-ndrdisc.robot* => 2 ports of 10GE on
212 Intel x520 NIC, dot1q tagged Ethernet, L2 bridge-domain baseline switching
213 with MAC learning, NDR throughput discovery.
214 - *10ge2p1x520-ethip4vxlan-l2bdbasemaclrn-ndrchk.robot* => 2 ports of 10GE
215 on Intel x520 NIC, IPv4 VXLAN Ethernet, L2 bridge-domain baseline
216 switching with MAC learning, NDR throughput discovery.
217 - *10ge2p1x520-ethip4-ip4base-ndrdisc.robot* => 2 ports of 10GE on Intel
218 x520 NIC, IPv4 baseline routed forwarding, NDR throughput discovery.
219 - *10ge2p1x520-ethip6-ip6scale200k-ndrdisc.robot* => 2 ports of 10GE on
220 Intel x520 NIC, IPv6 scaled up routed forwarding, NDR throughput
223 #. **Physical port to VM (or VM chain) to physical port - a.k.a. NIC2VM2NIC,
224 P2V2P, NIC2VMchain2NIC, P2V2V2P**
226 - *PortNICConfig-WireEncapsulation-PacketForwardingFunction-
227 PacketProcessingFunction1-...-PacketProcessingFunctionN-VirtEncapsulation-
228 VirtPortConfig-VMconfig-TestType*
229 - *10ge2p1x520-dot1q-l2bdbasemaclrn-eth-2vhost-1vm-ndrdisc.robot* => 2 ports
230 of 10GE on Intel x520 NIC, dot1q tagged Ethernet, L2 bridge-domain
231 switching to/from two vhost interfaces and one VM, NDR throughput
233 - *10ge2p1x520-ethip4vxlan-l2bdbasemaclrn-eth-2vhost-1vm-ndrdisc.robot* => 2
234 ports of 10GE on Intel x520 NIC, IPv4 VXLAN Ethernet, L2 bridge-domain
235 switching to/from two vhost interfaces and one VM, NDR throughput
237 - *10ge2p1x520-ethip4vxlan-l2bdbasemaclrn-eth-4vhost-2vm-ndrdisc.robot* => 2
238 ports of 10GE on Intel x520 NIC, IPv4 VXLAN Ethernet, L2 bridge-domain
239 switching to/from four vhost interfaces and two VMs, NDR throughput
242 Methodology: Multi-Thread and Multi-Core
243 ----------------------------------------
245 **HyperThreading** - CSIT |release| performance tests are executed with SUT
246 servers' Intel XEON CPUs configured in HyperThreading Disabled mode (BIOS
247 settings). This is the simplest configuration used to establish baseline
248 single-thread single-core SW packet processing and forwarding performance.
249 Subsequent releases of CSIT will add performance tests with Intel
250 HyperThreading Enabled (requires BIOS settings change and hard reboot).
252 **Multi-core Test** - CSIT |release| multi-core tests are executed in the
253 following VPP thread and core configurations:
255 #. 1t1c - 1 VPP worker thread on 1 CPU physical core.
256 #. 2t2c - 2 VPP worker threads on 2 CPU physical cores.
258 Note that in quite a few test cases running VPP on 2 physical cores hits
259 the tested NIC I/O bandwidth or packets-per-second limit.
261 Methodology: Packet Throughput
262 ------------------------------
264 Following values are measured and reported for packet throughput tests:
266 - NDR binary search per RFC2544:
268 - Packet rate: "RATE: <aggregate packet rate in packets-per-second> pps
269 (2x <per direction packets-per-second>)"
270 - Aggregate bandwidth: "BANDWIDTH: <aggregate bandwidth in Gigabits per
271 second> Gbps (untagged)"
273 - PDR binary search per RFC2544:
275 - Packet rate: "RATE: <aggregate packet rate in packets-per-second> pps (2x
276 <per direction packets-per-second>)"
277 - Aggregate bandwidth: "BANDWIDTH: <aggregate bandwidth in Gigabits per
278 second> Gbps (untagged)"
279 - Packet loss tolerance: "LOSS_ACCEPTANCE <accepted percentage of packets
282 - NDR and PDR are measured for the following L2 frame sizes:
284 - IPv4: 64B, IMIX_v4_1 (28x64B,16x570B,4x1518B), 1518B, 9000B.
285 - IPv6: 78B, 1518B, 9000B.
288 Methodology: Packet Latency
289 ---------------------------
291 TRex Traffic Generator (TG) is used for measuring latency of VPP DUTs. Reported
292 latency values are measured using following methodology:
294 - Latency tests are performed at 10%, 50% of discovered NDR rate (non drop rate)
295 for each NDR throughput test and packet size (except IMIX).
296 - TG sends dedicated latency streams, one per direction, each at the rate of
297 10kpps at the prescribed packet size; these are sent in addition to the main
299 - TG reports min/avg/max latency values per stream direction, hence two sets
300 of latency values are reported per test case; future release of TRex is
301 expected to report latency percentiles.
302 - Reported latency values are aggregate across two SUTs due to three node
303 topology used for all performance tests; for per SUT latency, reported value
304 should be divided by two.
305 - 1usec is the measurement accuracy advertised by TRex TG for the setup used in
306 FD.io labs used by CSIT project.
307 - TRex setup introduces an always-on error of about 2*2usec per latency flow -
308 additonal Tx/Rx interface latency induced by TRex SW writing and reading
309 packet timestamps on CPU cores without HW acceleration on NICs closer to the
313 Methodology: KVM VM vhost
314 -------------------------
316 CSIT |release| introduced environment configuration changes to KVM Qemu vhost-
317 user tests in order to more representatively measure |vpp-release| performance
318 in configurations with vhost-user interfaces and VMs.
320 Current setup of CSIT FD.io performance lab is using tuned settings for more
321 optimal performance of KVM Qemu:
323 - Qemu virtio queue size has been increased from default value of 256 to 1024
325 - Adjusted Linux kernel CFS scheduler settings, as detailed on this CSIT wiki
326 page: https://wiki.fd.io/view/CSIT/csit-perf-env-tuning-ubuntu1604.
328 Adjusted Linux kernel CFS settings make the NDR and PDR throughput performance
329 of VPP+VM system less sensitive to other Linux OS system tasks by reducing
330 their interference on CPU cores that are designated for critical software
331 tasks under test, namely VPP worker threads in host and Testpmd threads in
332 guest dealing with data plan.
334 Methodology: IPSec with Intel QAT HW cards
335 ------------------------------------------
337 VPP IPSec performance tests are using DPDK cryptodev device driver in
338 combination with HW cryptodev devices - Intel QAT 8950 50G - present in
339 LF FD.io physical testbeds. DPDK cryptodev can be used for all IPSec
340 data plane functions supported by VPP.
342 Currently CSIT |release| implements following IPSec test cases:
344 - AES-GCM, CBC-SHA1 ciphers, in combination with IPv4 routed-forwarding
345 with Intel xl710 NIC.
346 - CBC-SHA1 ciphers, in combination with LISP-GPE overlay tunneling for
347 IPv4-over-IPv4 with Intel xl710 NIC.
349 Methodology: TRex Traffic Generator Usage
350 -----------------------------------------
352 The `TRex traffic generator <https://wiki.fd.io/view/TRex>`_ is used for all
353 CSIT performance tests. TRex stateless mode is used to measure NDR and PDR
354 throughputs using binary search (NDR and PDR discovery tests) and for quick
355 checks of DUT performance against the reference NDRs (NDR check tests) for
356 specific configuration.
358 TRex is installed and run on the TG compute node. The typical procedure is:
360 - If the TRex is not already installed on TG, it is installed in the
361 suite setup phase - see `TRex intallation`_.
362 - TRex configuration is set in its configuration file
367 - TRex is started in the background mode
370 $ sh -c 'cd /opt/trex-core-2.25/scripts/ && sudo nohup ./t-rex-64 -i -c 7 --iom 0 > /dev/null 2>&1 &' > /dev/null
372 - There are traffic streams dynamically prepared for each test. The traffic
373 is sent and the statistics obtained using trex_stl_lib.api.STLClient.
375 **Measuring packet loss**
377 - Create an instance of STLClient
378 - Connect to the client
381 - Send the traffic for defined time
384 If there is a warm-up phase required, the traffic is sent also before test and
385 the statistics are ignored.
387 **Measuring latency**
389 If measurement of latency is requested, two more packet streams are created (one
390 for each direction) with TRex flow_stats parameter set to STLFlowLatencyStats. In
391 that case, returned statistics will also include min/avg/max latency values.