# Userspace Datapath - TSO

Note: This feature is considered experimental.

TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) enables a network stack to delegate segmentation of an oversized TCP segment to the underlying physical NIC. Offload of frame segmentation achieves computational savings in the core, freeing up CPU cycles for more useful work.

A common use case for TSO is when using virtualization, where traffic that’s coming in from a VM can offload the TCP segmentation, thus avoiding the fragmentation in software. Additionally, if the traffic is headed to a VM within the same host further optimization can be expected. As the traffic never leaves the machine, no MTU needs to be accounted for, and thus no segmentation and checksum calculations are required, which saves yet more cycles. Only when the traffic actually leaves the host the segmentation needs to happen, in which case it will be performed by the egress NIC. Consult your controller’s datasheet for compatibility. Secondly, the NIC must have an associated DPDK Poll Mode Driver (PMD) which supports TSO. For a list of features per PMD, refer to the DPDK documentation.

## Enabling TSO

The TSO support may be enabled via a global config value `userspace-tso-enable`. Setting this to `true` enables TSO support for all ports.:

    $ ovs-vsctl set Open_vSwitch . other_config:userspace-tso-enable=true

The default value is `false`.

Changing `userspace-tso-enable` requires restarting the daemon.

When using vHost User ports, TSO may be enabled as follows.

TSO is enabled in OvS by the DPDK vHost User backend; when a new guest connection is established, TSO is thus advertised to the guest as an available feature:

QEMU Command Line Parameter:

    $ sudo $QEMU_DIR/x86_64-softmmu/qemu-system-x86_64 \
    ...
    -device virtio-net-pci,mac=00:00:00:00:00:01,netdev=mynet1,\
    csum=on,guest_csum=on,guest_tso4=on,guest_tso6=on\
    ...

2. Ethtool. Assuming that the guest’s OS also supports TSO, ethtool can be used to enable same:

    $ ethtool -K eth0 sg on     # scatter-gather is a prerequisite for TSO
    $ ethtool -K eth0 tso on
    $ ethtool -k eth0

### Limitations

The current OvS userspace TSO implementation supports flat and VLAN networks only (i.e. no support for TSO over tunneled connection [VxLAN, GRE, IPinIP, etc.]).

The NIC driver must support and advertise checksum offload for TCP and UDP. However, SCTP is not mandatory because very few drivers advertised support and it wasn’t a widely used protocol at the moment this feature was introduced in Open vSwitch. Currently, if the NIC supports that, then the feature is enabled, otherwise TSO can still be enabled but SCTP packets sent to the NIC will be dropped.

There is no software implementation of TSO, so all ports attached to the datapath must support TSO or packets using that feature will be dropped on ports without TSO support. That also means guests using vhost-user in client mode will receive TSO packet regardless of TSO being enabled or disabled within the guest.

All kernel devices that use the raw socket interface (veth, for example) require the kernel commit 9d2f67e43b73 (“net/packet: fix packet drop as of virtio gso”) in order to work properly. This commit was merged in upstream kernel 4.19-rc7, so make sure your kernel is either newer or contains the backport.

### Performance Tuning

iperf is often used to test TSO performance. Care needs to be taken when configuring the environment in which the iperf server process is being run. Since the iperf server uses the NIC’s kernel driver, IRQs will be generated. By default with some NICs eg. i40e, the IRQs will land on the same core as that which is being used by the server process, provided the number of NIC queues is greater or equal to that lcoreid. This causes contention between the iperf server process and the IRQs. For optimal performance, it is suggested to pin the IRQs to their own core. To change the affinity associated with a given IRQ number, you can ‘echo’ the desired coremask to the file /proc/irq/<number>/smp_affinity For more on SMP affinity, refer to the Linux kernel documentation.