Howard is an IT standards engineer at Huawei. He has been working on open source for about 6 years and attended the early Open vSwitch conferences, including the earliest one held at Cisco in 2014. In this episode of OVS Orbit, Howard talks about the OpenStack Cyborg project in OpenStack, which was formerly called Nomad. Howard is the “caretaking” PTL for the project.

The Cyborg project supports all kinds of hardware acceleration for OpenStack. It spans networking, storage, and other areas, primarily because users tend to think of acceleration as a single bucket of features. Acceleration features across these multiple areas do require common lifecycle management processes, supplied by Cyborg as as a common management framework.

Open vSwitch relates to Cyborg on the network acceleration angle. Howard says that OVS can benefit from lifecycle management for hardware acceleration, especially when the DPDK datapath is involved. This could allow users to ensure that OVS is always properly configured for the local hardware. Even in the absence of special acceleration hardware, DPDK requires NIC- and CPU-specific configuration and tuning that amounts to a kind of software acceleration, which Cyborg can help to manage.

Howard says that the project is planning an initial release for September 2017, in time for the OpenStack developer meeting.

The Cyborg website and master

slide deck are good basic resources for learning about Cyborg.

You can contact or follow Howard on Twitter as @nopainkiller.

OVS Orbit is produced by Ben Pfaff. The intro music in this episode is Drive, featuring cdk and DarrylJ, copyright 2013, 2016 by Alex. The bumper music is Yeah Ant featuring Wired Ant and Javolenus, copyright 2013 by Speck. The outro music is Space

Bazooka featuring Doxen Zsigmond, copyright 2013 by Kirkoid. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.