SmartNIC DPU Enablement in OpenStack with OVN
Off-path SmartNIC DPUs introduce a change to the existing infrastructure architectures where the network control plane components that used to run on hypervisor hosts now run on SmartNIC DPU hosts. This brings benefits in security and performance while also allowing for more advanced infrastructure use-cases. However, control plane changes are required in order to account for that. Canonical have been working on addressing this in the upstream OpenStack and OVN projects in order to enable SmartNIC DPUs to work natively in OpenStack deployments and create a baseline design for other infrastructure projects utilizing OVN.
In this session, an overview of the existing hardware offload-capable cards and DPUs will be provided for comparison from the network control plane perspective. Following that, changes to Nova, Neutron, OVN and Libvirt will be discussed that address the identified control plane challenges including API flows, approaches to auto-discovery and other related details.
