DOCA Documentation v1.5.0 LTS

L2 Reflector

NVIDIA DOCA L2 Reflector Application Guide

This document provides an L2 reflector implementation on top of the NVIDIA® BlueField®-3 DPU.

The BlueField-3 DPU supports high-speed DPA. Data path accelerator allows for accelerated packet processing and manipulation.

DOCA Layer-2 (L2) Reflector uses the DPA engine to intercept network traffic and swap the source and destination MAC addresses of each packet.

The application accepts traffic from specific port given as an argument and leverage the DPA capabilities for accelerated processing.

The following figure shows a view of the high-level components of the application:

system-design-diagram.png

DOCA L2 Reflector runs on top of FlexIO SDK to configure the DPA engine.

architecture-diagram.png

The FlexIO application consist of two parts:

  • Host side – responsible for allocating resources and loading them to the DPA
  • Device side – core processing logic of the application which swaps the MACs on the DPA

For more information, please refer to the NVIDIA DOCA FlexIO SDK Programming Guide.

This application leverages the following DOCA driver:

This section lists the application's configuration flow which includes different FlexIO functions and wrappers.

  1. Parse application argument.
    1. Initialize arg parser resources and register DOCA general parameters.
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      doca_argp_init();

    2. Register the application's parameters.
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      register_l2_reflector_params();

    3. Parse the arguments.
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      doca_argp_start();

  2. Setup the InfiniBand device.
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    l2_reflector_setup_ibv_device();

  3. Setup the DPA device.
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    l2_reflector_setup_device();

  4. Allocate the device's resources.
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    l2_reflector_allocate_device_resources();

  5. Run initialization function on the device:
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    flexio_process_call();

  6. Create the steering rule.
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    l2_reflector_create_steering_rule();

  7. Start the event handler on the device.
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    flexio_event_handler_run();

  8. Main loop.
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    while (!force_quit) sleep(10);

  9. Cleanup the resources.
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    l2_reflector_destroy();

NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU is required.

  1. Refer to the following documents:
  2. The L2 Reflector binary is located under /opt/mellanox/doca/applications/l2_reflector/bin/l2_reflector. To build all the applications together, run:
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    cd /opt/mellanox/doca/applications/ meson build ninja -C build


  3. To build only the allreduce application:
    1. Edit the following flags in /opt/mellanox/doca/applications/meson_option.txt:
      • Set enable_all_applications to false
      • Set enable_l2_reflector to true
    2. Run the commands in step 2.
      Note:

      l2_reflector will be created under ./build/l2_reflector/src/host/.

    Application usage:

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    Usage: l2_reflector [DOCA Flags] [Program Flags] DOCA Flags: -h, --help Print a help synopsis -v, --version Print program version information -l, --log-level Set the log level for the program <CRITICAL=20, ERROR=30, WARNING=40, INFO=50, DEBUG=60> Program Flags: -d, --device <device name> Device name

    Note:

    For additional information on the application, use -h:

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    /opt/mellanox/doca/applications/l2_reflector/bin/l2_reflector -h


  4. CLI example for running the application on BlueField/host:
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    /opt/mellanox/doca/applications/l2_reflector/bin/l2_reflector -d mlx5_0

  5. To run l2_reflector using a JSON file:
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    <application name> --json [json_file]

    For example:
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    cd /opt/mellanox/doca/applications/l2_reflector/bin ./l2_reflector –-json ./l2_reflector_params.json


Refer to NVIDIA DOCA Arg Parser User Guide for more information.

Flag Type Short Flag Long Flag/JSON Key Description JSON Content
General Flags l log-level Sets the log level for the application:
  • CRITICAL=20
  • ERROR=30
  • WARNING=40
  • INFO=50
  • DEBUG=60
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"log-level": 60

v version Print program version information N/A
h help Prints a help synopsis N/A
Program Flags d device Device name
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"device": mlx5_0

  • /opt/mellanox/doca/applications/l2_reflector/src/common/l2_reflector_common.h
  • /opt/mellanox/doca/applications/l2_reflector/src/device/l2_reflector_device.c
  • /opt/mellanox/doca/applications/l2_reflector/src/host/l2_reflector_core.c
  • /opt/mellanox/doca/applications/l2_reflector/src/host/l2_reflector_core.h
  • /opt/mellanox/doca/applications/l2_reflector/src/host/l2_reflector.c
  • /opt/mellanox/doca/applications/l2_reflector/bin/l2_reflector_params.json

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