Oko: Extending Open vSwitch with Stateful Filters, with Paul Chaignon from Orange Labs and Inria Nancy - a podcast by Ben Pfaff

Paul Chaignon is a grad student at Orange and Inria. In this episode,
Paul talks aboutOko: Extending Open
vSwitch with Stateful Filters, a paper written with co-authors Kahina
Lazri, Jérôme François, Thibault Delmas, and Olivier Festor. Paulpresented this research atSOSR '18in March
2018. The paper has the following abstract:

With the Software-Defined Networking paradigm, software switches
emerged as the new edge of datacenter networks. The widely adopted OpenvSwitch implements the OpenFlow forwarding model; its simple
match-action abstraction eases network management, while providingenough flexibility to define complex forwarding pipelines. OpenFlow,
however, cannot express the many packets processing algorithms requiredfor traffic measurement, network security, or congestion diagnosis, as
it lacks a persistent state and basic arithmetic and logic operations.

This paper presents Oko, an extension of Open vSwitch that enables
runtime integration of stateful filtering and monitoringfunctionalities based on Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) programs into the
OpenFlow pipeline. BPF programs attached to OpenFlow rules act asintelligent filters over packets, while leaving the packets
unmodified. This approach enables the transparent extension of OpenvSwitch's flow caching architecture, retaining its high-performance
benefits. Furthermore, the use of BPF allows for safe runtime extensionand prevention of switch failures due to faulty programs.

We compare our implementation based on Open vSwitch-DPDK to existing
approaches with comparable isolation properties and measure a near 2ximprovement of performance.

You can contact Paul on Twitter as@pchaigno.

OVS Orbit is produced byBen Pfaff. The
intro music in this episode isDrive,
featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumpermusic isYeah Antfeaturing Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro
music isSpace
Bazookafeaturing Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All
content is licensed under a Creative CommonsAttribution 3.0
Unported (CC BY 3.0)license.

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