Roadmap with Cisco's VPP and DPDK

jahonix · Dec 27, 2017, 2:42 AM

After reading the blog post about Application Detection on pfSense Software I took some time to investigate on VPP and DPDK.
Turns out there's a video from jwt at DPDK summit available covering exactly this in a short presentation. It's already on YT so it can't be a secret anymore. Just don't know why it's not announced any louder here (or did I miss it?).

Some more infos on VPP here https://youtu.be/9SLoVqfd1Xw

All I read and heard sounds "interesting" to say the least. Looking forward to testing things out!

mikeisfly · Dec 29, 2017, 12:40 PM

I just came across the YouTube video myself and found it interesting, so I searched for it on the Pfsense forums and only saw your post. Looks very interesting and I would love to test it as well. I'm wondering if this performance upgrade feature will only be available with hardware from Netgate or will the enhancements be made available to the community version as well? If not can the performance gains be purchased? This leads to all kinds of questions but I will just leave it there for the moment.

jwt · Dec 31, 2017, 5:55 AM

We started “Project Pennybacker” in October 2014. The products that will come from that code awe are “TNSR” and “SCLR”. Those are pronounced “Tensor” and “Scalar”. If you’re familiar with the mathematics around “vectors” these names will make some sense.

Both are licensed, meaning you will be able to run them on the (supported) hardware you choose. The lincensing will include customer support.

I mention “supported” hardware because not all hardware will run DPDK. That said, we plan support for netmap, as well as 64-bit Intel, and several arm64 SoCs.

The differences between TNSR and SCLR will be announced soon.

These products are separate from, and different than, pfSense. I’m torn about discussing them on the pfSense forum.

We do have plans for a port of the components of SCLR to FreeBSD, such that any supported hardware runnig pfSense >= 2.4 will be able to upgrade to SCLR. The roadmap for this isn’t finished yet, so I don’t have a timeframe to announce.

mikeisfly · Dec 31, 2017, 8:49 AM

Thanks for the info, I'm glad to see a project that I supported coming of age. The team has worked very hard for years, I'm excited for what the future holds for pfsense. I for one am thankful for what information you have released and will wait patiently for more news to come.