Release Notes

Changes in CSIT-2009

  1. VPP PERFORMANCE TESTS

    • CSIT test environment is versioned, see Environment Versioning.

    • To identify performance changes due to VPP code changes from v20.05.0 to v20.09.0, both have been tested in CSIT environment ver. 5 and compared against each other. All substantial progressions has been marked up with RCA analysis. See Current vs Previous Release and Known Issues.

    • NAT44 tests: Adapted existing and added new tests.

      • Refactored NAT44 deterministic mode (nat44det) tests to use separate det44 vpp plugin and to use the same scheme of inside and outside addresses and ports, as used in new NAT44 endpoint-dependent mode tests.

      • Added new NAT44 endpoint-depended mode uni-directional (nat44ed-udir) tests that measure packet throughput in one direction with usage of TRex in stateless mode.

      • Added new NAT44 endpoint-dependent mode CPS tests that measure connections per second with usage of TRex in stateful mode. UPD packet size is 64 bytes. Size of TCP control packets is not configurable, please ignore the -64b- part of test names.

      • Added new NAT44 endpoint-dependent mode PPS tests that measure packets per second (control and data together) with usage of TRex in stateful mode. UPD packet size is 64 bytes. Size of TCP data packets is governed by the default MSS value, so most data packets are 1460 bytes long, please ignore the -64b- part of test names.

      • See Network Address Translation IPv4 to IPv4 for more details.

    • IPSec async mode tests: Added VPP performance tests for async crypto engine.

    • AMD 2n-zn2 testbed: New physical testbed type installed in FD.io CSIT, with VPP and DPDK performance data added to CSIT trending and this report.

  2. TEST FRAMEWORK

    • TRex ASTF: Added capability to run TRex in advanced stateful mode.

    • CSIT PAPI support: Due to issues with PAPI performance, VAT is still used in CSIT for all VPP scale tests. See known issues below.

    • General Code Housekeeping: Ongoing RF keywords optimizations, removal of redundant RF keywords and aligning of suite/test setup/teardowns.

    • Intel E810CQ 100G NIC: Added configuration for Intel E810CQ 100G NIC. No tests run for this NIC as it is not present in FD.io CSIT lab yet.

  3. PRESENTATION AND ANALYTICS LAYER

    • Graphs improvements: Added possibility to use Gbps on Y-axis in Packet Throughput and Speedup Multi-Core graphs, added unidirectional mode to the Latency graphs.

Known Issues

List of known issues in CSIT-2009 for VPP performance tests:

#

JiraID

Issue Description

1

CSIT-570

Sporadic (1 in 200) NDR discovery test failures on x520. DPDK reporting rx-errors, indicating L1 issue. Suspected issue with HW combination of X710-X520 in LF testbeds. Not observed outside of LF testbeds.

2

VPP-662

9000B packets not supported by NICs VIC1227 and VIC1387.

3

CSIT-1763

Adapt ramp-up phase of nat44 tests for different frame sizes. Currently ramp-up phase rate and duration values are correctly set for tests with 64B frame size.

4

CSIT-1671

All CSIT scale tests can not use PAPI due to much slower performance compared to VAT/CLI (it takes much longer to program VPP). This needs to be addressed on the PAPI side. The usual PAPI library spends too much time parsing arguments, so even with async processing (hundreds of commands in flight over socket), the VPP configuration for large scale tests (millions of messages) takes too long.

VPP-1763

5

CSIT-1771

IPv4 IPSEC 9000B packet tests had been failing when chained buffers were not supported. This has been fixed on VPP side, but CSIT still needs to re-enable jumbo tests.

6

VPP-1934

[i40e] Interfaces are not brought up from carrier-down. In case of i40e -based interface (e.g Intel x700 series NIC) is bound to kernel driver (i40e) and is in state “no-carrier” (<NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP>) because previously it was disabled via “I40E_AQ_PHY_LINK_ENABLED” call, then VPP during initialization of AVF interface is not re-enabling interface link via i40e driver to up. CSIT implemented workaround for AVF interface until fixed.

7

CSIT-1760

All Mellanox / rdma driver tests are failing on LF testbed28 while successfully run on other LF testbeds.

Root Cause Analysis for Performance Changes

List of RCAs in CSIT-2009 for VPP performance changes:

#

JiraID

Issue Description

1