21.7. DPDK

21.7.1. Introduction

The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) is a set of libraries and drivers that enhance and speed up packet processing in the data plane. Its primary use is to provide faster packet processing by bypassing the kernel network stack, which can provide significant performance improvements. For detailed instructions on how to setup DPDK, please refer to Suricata.yaml to learn more about the basic setup for DPDK. The following sections contain examples of how to set up DPDK and Suricata for more obscure use-cases.

21.7.2. Bond interface

Link Bonding Poll Mode Driver (Bond PMD), is a software mechanism provided by the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) for aggregating multiple physical network interfaces into a single logical interface. Bonding can be e.g. used to:

  • deliver bidirectional flows of tapped interfaces to the same worker,

  • establish redundancy by monitoring multiple links,

  • improve network performance by load-balancing traffic across multiple links.

Bond PMD is essentially a virtual driver that manipulates with multiple physical network interfaces. It can operate in multiple modes as described in the DPDK docs The individual bonding modes can accustom user needs. DPDK Bond PMD has a requirement that the aggregated interfaces must be the same device types - e.g. both physical ports run on mlx5 PMD. Bond PMD supports multiple queues and therefore can work in workers runmode. It should have no effect on traffic distribution of the individual ports and flows should be distributed by physical ports according to the RSS configuration the same way as if they would be configured independently.

As an example of Bond PMD, we can setup Suricata to monitor 2 interfaces that receive TAP traffic from optical interfaces. This means that Suricata receive one direction of the communication on one interface and the other direction is received on the other interface.

...
dpdk:
  eal-params:
    proc-type: primary
    vdev: 'net_bonding0,mode=0,slave=0000:04:00.0,slave=0000:04:00.1'

  # DPDK capture support
  # RX queues (and TX queues in IPS mode) are assigned to cores in 1:1 ratio
  interfaces:
    - interface: net_bonding0 # PCIe address of the NIC port
      # Threading: possible values are either "auto" or number of threads
      # - auto takes all cores
      # in IPS mode it is required to specify the number of cores and the
      # numbers on both interfaces must match
      threads: 4
...

In the DPDK part of suricata.yaml we have added a new parameter to the eal-params section for virtual devices - vdev. DPDK Environment Abstraction Layer (EAL) can initialize some virtual devices during the initialization of EAL. In this case, EAL creates a new device of type net_bonding. Suffix of net_bonding signifies the name of the interface (in this case the zero). Extra arguments are passed after the device name, such as the bonding mode (mode=0). This is the round-robin mode as is described in the DPDK documentation of Bond PMD. Members (slaves) of the net_bonding0 interface are appended after the bonding mode parameter.

When the device is specified within EAL parameters, it can be used within Suricata interfaces list. Note that the list doesn't contain PCIe addresses of the physical ports but instead the net_bonding0 interface. Threading section is also adjusted according to the items in the interfaces list by enablign set-cpu-affinity and listing CPUs that should be used in management and worker CPU set.

...
threading:
  set-cpu-affinity: yes
  cpu-affinity:
    - management-cpu-set:
        cpu: [ 0 ]  # include only these CPUs in affinity settings
    - receive-cpu-set:
        cpu: [ 0 ]  # include only these CPUs in affinity settings
    - worker-cpu-set:
        cpu: [ 2,4,6,8 ]
...