ReleaseNotes

Onload-7.1.0
============

 This is a feature release of Onload that adds system-level interface
 blacklisting, provides improvements for XDP and TCPDirect, includes various
 bug fixes and refreshes the sfc net driver included in the package.

 This release is the successor to Onload-7.0.0.176.

 See the accompanying ChangeLog for a list of bugs fixed.

Linux distribution support
--------------------------

 This package is supported on:
 - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 - 6.10
 - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 - 7.8
 - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 - 8.2
 - SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 sp4 and sp5
 - SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 and sp1
 - Canonical Ubuntu Server LTS 16.04, 18.04 and 20.04
 - Debian 9 "Stretch"
 - Debian 10 "Buster"
 - Linux kernels 3.10 - 5.5


System-level interface blacklisting
-----------------------------------

In addition to the per-stack EF_INTERFACE_BLACKLIST and EF_INTERFACE_WHITELIST
in OpenOnload-201710, a system-level configuration has been added. Files
in /proc/driver/sfc_resource/<intf-name>/enable may be written with "1" or
"0" to enable or disable a network interface for all applications on the
system. Onloaded applications will not accelerate sockets using a disabled
interface (the socket will be handled by the kernel). ef_vi applications will
fail the ef_pd_alloc call at startup. By default, all interfaces are enabled
when the driver is loaded; to disable all interfaces initially pass the
"enable_accel_by_default=0" module parameter to sfc_resource.


Onload Remote Monitor enhancement
---------------------------------

The Onload Remote Monitor has been enhanced to add a new orm_json_lib library,
which can be used by customers to build their own custom monitoring solutions.

The existing orm_webserver and orm_json functionality has been retained
(internally this now uses the orm_json_lib library).

A simple example of how to use orm_json_lib is provided in
src/tools/onload_remote_monitor/orm_zmq_publisher.c
This will publish the chosen statistics via a ZeroMQ publisher every N seconds.
A companion example src/tools/onload_remote_monitor/zmq_subscriber.c can be
used to receive the JSON statistics via ZeroMQ.


eBPF/XDP
--------

The implementation of XDP features is now delegated to the currently-running
kernel. This expands the set of supported XDP features to those provided by
the kernel but means that XDP is no longer supported on older OSs that do not
provide the corresponding features natively.

On Onload-7.0.0.176, XDP was implemented using a snapshot of the Linux 4.20
implementation.


Acceleration of traffic using addresses not configured on SFC NICs
------------------------------------------------------------------

A new module parameter, cplane_use_prefsrc_as_local, allows Onload to
accelerate outgoing traffic over Solarflare interfaces where the route
selects a preferred source IP address that is not configured on that
interface.

This parameter is in addition to the more general oof_use_all_ports module
Parameter.


New configuration options
-------------------------

 - EF_XDP_MODE

   Configure whether XDP programs are run on packets received by Onload.
   The default is 'disabled'. 'compatible' causes Onload to use XDP programs
   attached to Solarflare devices and implicitly enables in-kernel polling.


Modified configuration options
------------------------------

 - EF_UDP_CONNECT_HANDOVER

   In addition to the previously-accepted values, this option now also accepts
   a value of 2, which will cause all UDP sockets to be handed over when
   calling connect(), regardless of whether the socket could have been
   accelerated.


Deprecation
-----------

The ability to insert filters to steer kernel traffic using sfcaffinity
remains deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Instead ethtool
should be used for this purpose.