This page provides the current Release Notes for Intel® vCMTS Reference Dataplane. The notes are categorized by major version, from newest to oldest, with individual releases listed within each version section.
2022
Intel® vCMTS Reference Dataplane v22.10.0
Release Date:
Oct 28, 2022
New release of Intel® vCMTS Reference Dataplane for Bare Metal Reference Architecture (BMRA) and Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform (OCP) deployment, with the new features listed below.
Enablement on 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processor (SP) Architecture, including support for:
- Combined Cipher-CRC offload to Intel® QuickAssist Technology (QAT) 2.0
- Power optimized C-states for DPDK*-based dataplane cores through the WAITPKG instruction set, and enabled via the DPDK Power Management API
Support for deployment on Red Hat® OCP
Support for DPDK Cryptodev Scheduler
Addition of 'internal' DOCSIS Upstream Scheduler deployment mode
Addition of new Traffic Profile Generation Tool
Enhancement of throughput measurement test to allow specification of priority vCMTS instances
Upgrade to Ubuntu* 22.04
Upgrade to BMRA v22.05
Updates to support DPDK* v22.07 and intel-ipsec-mb v1.3
Support for new iMix traffic profile with the following IP packet size distributions:
- Upstream: 84B: 35%, 768B: 25%, 1280B: 40%
- Downstream: 84B: 17%, 768B: 7%, 1280B: 76%
Enhancements for Amazon* Web Services (AWS) cloud deployments
Fixes in this release:
- NICs with different subsystem device ids but the same bandwidth limits could not be used simultaneously
- function within PM tool to get the next lcore id for a service group was called in incorrect place
- performance drop when ring mempools and NIC descriptor size of 1024 is used
- new jinja version causing BMRA Ansible Playbook to fail
- unused variable 'service_group_enabled' in vcmts-d stats_collectd.c file should be removed
- Intel® logo location for Grafana* dashboards has moved
- classifier service-flow queue selected stat counted twice
- Bitrate per SF Queue graph on Grafana showing incorrect values
- BWMap requests not decoded correctly from UEPIs
- redefinition of 'channels_number' variable in stats files causing linker failure with newer GCC versions
- endian swap of DOCSIS Frame Header HCS before verification
- issues with DOCSIS Frame extraction from upstream DOCSIS segments when MAC header is split across segments
- issue in PM tool with assigning application instances to NIC PFs when the NICs are not evenly balanced across the NUMA nodes of a server
- DOCSIS segment header HCS not generated within upstream UEPI pcaps or verified during UEPI decapsulation
Removed in this release:
- support for out-of-band power management based on CPU branch-monitoring
Limitations:
- DOCSIS MAC Control-plane is simulated using JSON files to load cable-modem info
- DOCSIS timing interface not implemented
- DOCSIS Upstream Scheduler not fully implemented - dummy bandwidth MAP's used
- Control-plane and Upstream Scheduler frames are not included in traffic simulation, except for Queue-depth Based Request Frames in the upstream UEPI pcaps
- IP headers of upstream DOCSIS frames not decrypted
- Concatenation of upstream service-flows not supported
- pcm-memory tool, for measuring memory bandwidth, not supported on 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® servers
- IPv6 traffic not supported
- For Red Hat® OCP deployments only:
- 'external' Upstream Scheduler deployment mode not supported
- vCMTS CLI not supported
- Intel® QuickAssist Technology not supported on 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® servers until in-tree kernel driver is available
Assumptions:
- The vCMTS reference dataplane and traffic generator should be run on Intel® Xeon® based servers
- Intel® Ethernet Network Adapter 700 or 800 series must be used for Network I/O
- If DOCSIS BPI encryption acceleration is required, Intel® QuickAssist Technology must be used
- For BMRA deployments, Ubuntu* 22.04 LTS OS should be installed on both vCMTS and Traffic generator nodes with Linux* Kernel v5.15.0 or later
- The vCMTS reference dataplane system provided in this package must be deployed in a secure environment such as a private lab network, which is not publicly accessible
2021
Intel® vCMTS Reference Dataplane v21.10.0
Release Date:
Oct 29, 2021
New release of Intel® vCMTS Reference Dataplane for Bare Metal Reference Architecture (BMRA) deployment, with the new features listed below.
Support for deployment of Inte® vCMTS Reference Dataplane on BMRA v21.09, including:
- Kubernetes* installation by BMRA Ansible Playbooks
- Kubernetes native CPU management instead of CMK for CPU core management
- Prometheus used as telemetry time-series database instead of InfluxDB*
- Containerd as container runtime instead of Docker*
- vCMTS dataplane Grafana* dashboards updated for BMRA deployment
- BMRA patches for vCMTS
DOCSIS Upstream Scheduling.
Enhanced DOCSIS Filter processing.
Updates to support DPDK* v21.08 and intel-ipsec-mb v1.0.
Support for Intel Chapman Beach 200G NIC's.
New features added to DOCSIS DDP sample application
- VF switching based on VLAN ID
- VF switching based on L2TP session ID
- queue steering based on DSCP value
Security enhancements:
- vfio instead of igb_uio for user-space NIC device access
- updated vCMTS CLI to use TLS 1.2
- temporary dtach files should not be stored in /tmp
- variables should be defined before use in Python* modules
Fixes in this release:
- UEPI decapsulation logic should use UEPI data segment SID for CM look-up
- empty step during configuration of Service Groups when using vcmts-pm tool
- DOCSIS filter processing set to high stats level causes the vcmts-d to exit
- per-second drop stats only displayed if bytes-rcvd stat being incremented
- CLI not working if vcmts-d running in USDS or DS_UMLM thread modes
- CLI tests failing if vcmts-d is running as a BIDIR application
- log-level in vcmts-d cfg file not being used for application log-types
- Turbo-boost disable issue
- issue related to environment function for DPDK Power-Mgr build
- Type-of-Service (ToS) field of filter rules not working as expected
- issue with 25G NIC duplication for 700 and 800 series NIC's
- issues reported by static analysis tools
Limitations:
- DOCSIS MAC Ctrl-Plane is simulated using JSON files to load cable-modem info
- DOCSIS timing interface not implemented
- DOCSIS Upstream Scheduler not fully implemented - dummy bandwidth MAP's used
- Control-plane and Upstream Scheduler frames not included in traffic simulation
- IP headers of upstream DOCSIS frames not decrypted
- DOCSIS segment Header-Checksum (HCS) not generated for upstream traffic
- Concatenation of upstream service-flows not supported
- IPv6 traffic not supported
Assumptions:
- The vCMTS reference dataplane and traffic generator should be run on Intel® Xeon® based servers
- Intel® Ethernet Network Adapter 700 or 800 series must be used for Network I/O
- If DOCSIS BPI encryption acceleration is required, Intel® QuickAssist Technology must be used
- Ubuntu* 20.04 LTS OS should be installed on both vCMTS and Traffic generator nodes with Linux* Kernel v5.4.0 or later
- The vCMTS reference dataplane system provided in this package must be deployed in a secure environment such as a private lab network, which is not publicly accessible.
2020
Intel vCMTS Reference Dataplane v20.10.0
Release Date:
Oct 30, 2020
New release of Intel vCMTS reference dataplane system.
Main Features
- Support for AVX-512 optimized Crypto-CRC processing using the Intel® IPSec Multi-Buffer library (for AES encryption with CRC)
- DPDK patch for AVX-512 optimized CRC (used with DES or QAT encryption)
- DPDK rte-security and rte-cryptodev API's used for Crypto-CRC processing
- Support for 256 bit AES Encryption
- Priority core assignment based on Intel® Speed Select Technology Base Frequency feature
- Support for out-of-band power management based on CPU branch-monitoring
- Option for vCMTS upstream and downstream processing on same data-plane thread
- vCMTS and Pktgen environment support for 2M Huge-pages
- Code and documentation updates for inclusive terminology
- Sample application to demonstrate DOCSIS traffic steering using Dynamic Device Personalization (DDP) and RSS features of the network interface card (NIC) produced by Intel
- HQoS enhancements: use of best-effort traffic-class, optimal packet burst sizes to reduce packet latency, buffered packet count statistics
- vCMTS Platform Management tool (vcmts-pm) improvements: bi-directional traffic measurement, memory B/W measurement, latency measurement improvements, core mapping improvements
Version Updates:
- DPDK version to v20.08
- intel-ipsec-mb version to v0.55
- Kubernetes version to 1.18
- CMK (CPU Manager for Kubernetes) version to v1.4.1
- SR-IOV device plugin version to v3.2.0
- Helm* version to v3.0.0
- Ubuntu version to 20.04
Fixes:
- Non IPv4/ARP packets may cause seg-fault in vCMTS dataplane
- Possible endless lower MAC enqueue loop in single-thread downstream
- Bug in Pktgen configuration related to different CPU socket layout to vCMTS
- Issue when using NICs on single socket only on dual socket system
- Statistics for only 1 channel being displayed on Grafana
- Issue with vcmts-pm crypto query not detecting CMs with crypto off correctly
- Issues with vcmts-pm query commands not checking for 'true'
- Missing config files causing errors with Kubernetes deployment
- Kubernetes infra start failing when doing fresh install due to BM dependency
- Error message not including service-name when installing Kubernetes
Limitations:
- DOCSIS MAC Control-plane is simulated using JSON files to load cable-modem information
- DOCSIS timing interface not implemented
- DOCSIS Upstream scheduler not implemented NOTE: upstream DOCSIS stream segments allocated to cable modems through upstream traffic simulation
- ICMP and LLC traffic not included in traffic simulation
- IP headers of upstream DOCSIS frames are not decrypted
- DOCSIS segment Header-Checksum (HCS) not generated for upstream traffic simulation
- Concatenation of upstream service-flows not supported
- Optimized DES encryption not supported on Broadwell platforms
- IPv6 not supported
Assumptions:
- The vCMTS reference dataplane and traffic generator should be run on Intel® Xeon® based servers
- Intel® Ethernet Network Adapter 700 or 800 series must be used for Network I/O
- If DOCSIS BPI encryption acceleration is required, Intel® Quick Assist Technology must be used
- Ubuntu 20.04 LTS OS should be installed on both vCMTS and Traffic generator nodes with Linux Kernel v5.9.0 or later
- The vCMTS reference dataplane system provided in this package must be deployed in a secure environment such as a private lab network
Intel vCMTS Reference Dataplane v19.12.1
Release Date:
Mar 20, 2020
Updates to initial v19.12 release of Intel® vCMTS reference dataplane.
vCMTS dataplane:
- DOCSIS filter and classifier optimizations
- support for single-threaded dataplane on upstream and downstream
- re-work of dataplane stats generation, to improve dataplane performance
- HQoS configuration improvement: use TC0 instead of TC12
- improvements to mempool mgmt configuration
Tools:
- vCMTS Platform Mgr feature to disable turbo
- vCMTS Platform Mgr service-group configuration options for single or dualthread vCMTS dataplane
Traffic-generation:
- Fixed Pktgen bug where setting the tx rate intermittently stopped the traffic
Orchestration:
- New versions of CMK and SR-IOV device plugin for Kubernetes
2019
Intel vCMTS Reference Dataplane v19.12.0
Release Date:
December, 2020
Major update of Intel® vCMTS reference dataplane.
Main Features:
- Intel 100G Columbiaville NIC support
- Multi-buffer implementation of combined Crypto/CRC
- Support for bare-metal environment
- New vCMTS CLI tool
- New vCMTS Platform Management tool (replaces previous Control and Config tools)
- DPDK version update to v19.11
- DPDK Pktgen version update to 19.10.0
- Kubernetes version update to 1.16 (and updated versions of CMK, SR-IOV plugin, QAT plugin)
Limitations:
- DOCSIS MAC Control-plane not implemented - this is simulated using JSON files to load cable-modem information
- DOCSIS Upstream scheduler not implemented - this is simulated by allocation of DOCSIS stream segments to cable modems in traffic simulation
- DOCSIS timing interface not implemented
- ICMP and LLC traffic not included in traffic simulation
- IP headers of upstream DOCSIS frames are not decrypted
- DOCSIS segment Header-Checksum (HCS) not generated for upstream traffic simulation
- Concatenation of upstream service-flows not supported
- IPv6 not supported
Assumptions
- The vCMTS reference dataplane and traffic generator should be run on Intel® Xeon® based server
- Intel® Ethernet Network Adapter 700 or 800 series must be used for Network I/O
- If DOCSIS BPI encryption hardware acceleration is required, Intel® Quick Assist Technology must be used
- Ubuntu 18.04 LTS OS should be installed on both vCMTS and Traffic generator nodes with Linux Kernel v4.15.0 or later
- The vCMTS reference dataplane system provided in this package must be deployed in a secure environment such as a private lab network.