Performance of IPv6 Segment Routing in Linux Kernel

Abstract

IPv6 Segment Routing (SRv6) is a promising solution to support advanced services such as Traffic Engineering, Service Function Chaining, Virtual Private Networks, and Load Balancing. The SRv6 data-plane is supported in many different forwarding engines including the Linux kernel. It has been introduced into the 4.10 release of the Linux kernel to support both endhost and router functionalities. The implementation has been updated several times, with every new kernel release, to include new features and also to improve the performance of existing ones. In this paper, we present SRPerf, a performance evaluation framework for software and hardware implementations of SRv6. SRPerf is able to perform different benchmarking tests such as throughput and latency. The architecture of SRPerf can be easily extended to support new benchmarking methodologies as well as different SRv6 implementations. We have used SRPerf to evaluate the performance of the SRv6 implementation in the Linux kernel.