About Whirl Offload

Engineering and doing research in fast networking environments can bring out many interesting technical or conceptual elements. At one point I wanted to share some of it, so here we are: this is my technical blog about my work in the field of fast networking.

If you wish to react to something I wrote here, please feel free to send me an email or to ping me on Twitter.

Disclaimers

I always wanted to associate this blog to the companies that pay me to do the work I write about, so initially I cited my first employer on all pages. Since at some point I took a new position in a different company—these things happen!—I modified my template, and now you can find on each post the logo and name of my employer at the moment I did the work. This does not imply any specific partnership between the companies mentioned on this website.

Please note that this remains a personal blog: while my employer is fully aware of its existence, the articles are not reviewed in details by the company before posting. This is not even a roadmap blog. So opinions, points of view, technical mistakes and so on are my own; experiments do not necessarily result in new functionalities for the company’s products; and at no point should the responsibility of my current or past employers be engaged about something that is written here.

For your information, the companies I have been working for do have official blogs, even though you may find that they are more commercial than technical. Here you will find 6WIND’s, and there is Netronome’s. Isovalent has its corporate blog, but also contributes a lot to Cilium’s blog, which is more technical.

About me

I am Quentin Monnet, a French R&D engineer. I joined 6WIND in fall 2015, after completing my PhD in computer science, and changed for Netronome two years later, in fall 2017. In 2020, I moved again to Isovalent.

I enjoy research, programming, open-source software, improving and sharing my technical skills. There is a bit of all those things in my current position, and in this blog I try to share the most interesting parts of it. You can find more details about me on my personal webpage.

About 6WIND

6WIND is a French medium company based close to Paris (with regional offices on other continents). It specialises in producing and selling quality software for high-speed packet processing in Linux environments. The company works on accelerating virtual networking infrastructure, and at the same time it tries to optimise hardware management on multicore architectures in order to provide extremely high bit rates with a variety of network protocols, while saving as much processing cores as possible for the software appliances. People there go by one motto: Speed Matters!

6WIND also contributes to several open-source projects, including DPDK, the Linux networking stack, OpenStack, Open vSwitch, Quagga / FRRouting and a few others.

It is also involved in research activities, and takes part in projects such as BEBA, with industrial but also academic partners.

More details are available on the company’s webpage.

About Netronome

Bringing Software Innovation Velocity to Networking Hardware. This motto is not as catchy, but it exposes clearly Netronome’s technical objectives. Again, speed and performances are at stake, but instead of working on pure software solutions, The company designs network cards. These devices, based on a number of “Network Flow Processors” (NFPs) are highly programmable. They can run as standard NICs, or they can serve as a support for hardware offload of technologies such as Open vSwitch or Linux eBPF. Optimised for x86 “Off-The-Shelf” servers, the cards can efficiently relieve the nodes from packet processing tasks and attain excellent performances in data center networking. Netronome is based in California, with offices other parts of the US and in various part of the world. I worked in the team in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Netronome takes part in several open-source projects and is an active contributor to the Linux kernel, and is involved in many other projects such DPDK or IO Visor.

Again, comprehensive information is available on the company’s website.

About Isovalent

Cilium is an open-source project bringing eBPF-based networking, observability, and security to cloud-native environments, in particular on Kubernetes clusters. It ensures connectivity between the different pod and containers, it provides additional services such as load-balancing or multi-cluster connectivity. Cilium also offers in-depth visibility about the network flows, implements advanced network policies, and comes with many other features—too many to list here!

Isovalent builds its product on top of the project, and offers a hardened and supported distribution of Cilium with advanced observability and security workflows. The company maintains Cilium and co-maintains the eBPF subsystem in Linux. I work on Cilium’s eBPF-powered datapath, and on a few other components.

Have a look at Isovalent’s website for more information.

Credits

This blog is hosted on GitHub and is powered by Jekyll. The theme is Jekyll’s default, slightly modified, and with custom colors. The style in use for code blocks was inspired by Luna.vim scheme. Some schemas include icons derived from an SVG version of the Font Awesome icons.

If everything goes well, it should be displayed with Fira Sans fonts, designed by Mozilla (and Fira Mono for code snippets).

The logo is based on a shot of a male magnificent frigate (“magnificent” is part of the name, actually) photographed by Wikimedia Commons’ user Benjamint444 and released under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) 1.2 (and as a consequence, so is the logo of this blog).

License

In the absence of other specific mention, contents and materials presented on this website are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The logos of the companies, of course, are under copyright or their respective owners, and not subject to this license.

I launched this blog in order to share my work with the community, so if you want to reuse some of the contents, please do not hesitate: help yourselves. And if you do so, it would be kind not to omit to attribute the work to its author and to the company he works for—thanks!