DPU-Accelerated OVS Offload

About the Organization

<p>About the project</p><p>OPI (Open Programmable Infrastructure), a Linux Foundation project, defines vendor-neutral</p><p>standards and tooling for DPUs / IPUs. This internship produces a reference blueprint for</p><p>running VM networking through OVS that is fully hardware-offloaded to a DPU - first under</p><p>vanilla KVM on RHEL, then under OpenShift Virtualization. NVIDIA BlueField-3 (BF3) is the</p><p>reference platform because it ships a complete, mature stack (OVS-DOCA, vDPA, and DPF).</p><p>The blueprint then generalizes to a second DPU / IPU vendor (Intel IPU or Marvell Octeon).</p><p>What you&amp;#39;ll work on</p><p>The work runs as two tracks. Track 1 (BF3) is the proven reference; Track 2 ports it to a second</p><p>vendor and surfaces the gaps that need upstream work.</p><p>Track 1 - BF3 reference</p><p>• KVM on RHEL with OVS fully offloaded to BF3 in DPU mode via OVS-DOCA. KVM / libvirt</p><p>guests attach over vDPA so the guest runs stock virtio-net while the datapath is</p><p>accelerated in hardware. Validate offload is actually in hardware, baseline performance,</p><p>and exercise live migration. This is the reference blueprint.</p><p>• OpenShift Virtualization on BF3 via NVIDIA DPF, with accelerated OVN-Kubernetes</p><p>(OVS-DOCA) offloaded to the DPU and KubeVirt VMs riding the offloaded fabric.</p><p>Track 2 - second vendor (Intel IPU or Marvell Octeon)</p><p>• KVM on RHEL with OVS offload and vDPA using the vendor&amp;#39;s stack (Marvell: in-kernel</p><p>octeon_ep vDPA driver and Octeon SDK; Intel: IPDK / P4 and IDPF). Document the deltas</p><p>from the BF3 reference.</p><p>• OpenShift Virtualization on the second vendor via the OPI / Red Hat DPU Operator.</p><p>Identify and contribute the work needed to reach full primary-datapath OVS offload and</p><p>KubeVirt enablement, since the operator today centers on network-function offload and</p><p>service function chaining rather than the full offloaded OVN datapath that DPF provides on</p><p>BF3.</p><p><br></p><p>Required</p><p>• Linux, Red Hat family (RHEL 9 / 10): systemd, networking stack, kernel modules, and</p><p>hands-on troubleshooting</p><p>• KVM / libvirt / QEMU: VM lifecycle, virtio / vhost, and vDPA (vhost-vdpa) concepts</p><p>• OVS: bridges, flows, OpenFlow, datapath internals, and hardware-offload concepts</p><p>(switchdev / eswitch mode, VF / SF representors)</p><p>• Kubernetes: core concepts, CRDs, operators, and CNI / pod networking - enough to grow</p><p>into OpenShift Virtualization and OVN-Kubernetes</p><p>• Networking fundamentals: L2 / L3, VLAN, VXLAN / Geneve, SR-IOV (PF / VF / SF), and</p><p>throughput / pps testing</p><p><br></p><p>2</p><p><br></p><p>Preferred (a plus)</p><p>• OVS-DOCA and the DOCA SDK / DPF (DOCA Platform Framework) on BlueField</p><p>• vDPA hands-on: mlx5_vdpa, octeon_ep, vhost-vdpa, libvirt vDPA, and vdpa netlink /</p><p>iproute2</p><p>• OVN / OVN-Kubernetes; OpenShift / OpenShift Virtualization (CNV / KubeVirt)</p><p>• OPI DPU Operator, and vendor offload stacks: Intel IPDK / P4 / IDPF, Marvell Octeon</p><p>SDK</p><p>• Go (operator development), Python, and Bash</p><p>• Prior open source contribution (public Git workflow, mailing lists / Slack); familiarity with</p><p>OPI</p><p><br></p><p><br></p>