Network traffic often needs to be prioritized. For instance control plane traffic should be prioritized over other data and protected from loss in an overload situation in order to keep the network infrastructure itself working.
However as DPDK gets much of its efficiency by using a run-to-completion model this makes traditional prioritization which involves inspecting packets and storing lower priority packets temporarily while higher priority packets are processed, difficult.
This talk outlines use cases for Ingress Scheduling and an approach that involves offloading the inspection of packets for priority/non-priority decision to the NIC. By assigning priority packets to a separate Rx descriptor queue and introducing the idea of a priority queue to Open vSwitch certain traffic can be effectively protected without compromising the efficiency of DPDK-enabled OVS.
