[xdp-cloud] Questions about Offloads and XDP-Hints regarding a Cloud-Provider Use-Case

[xdp-cloud] Questions about Offloads and XDP-Hints regarding a Cloud-Provider Use-Case

[Marcus Wichelmann]

Hello,

I'm working for a cloud hosting provider and we're working on a new 
XDP-based networking stack for our VM-Hosts that uses XDP to accelerate 
the connectivity of our qemu/KVM VMs to the outside.

For this, we use XDP_REDIRECT to forward packets between the physical 
host NIC and the VM tap devices. The main issue we have now is, that our 
VM guests have some virtio NIC offloads enabled: rx/tx checksumming, 
TSO/GSO, GRO and Scatter-Gather.
Currently, these offloads (especially TSO/GSO) are incompatible with 
XDP_REDIRECT and result in packets being dropped. Because disabling 
these offloads in all our customer VMs is not a good option, we're 
searching for ways to support these offloads with XDP.

The XDP multi-buffer support needed for TSO/GSO seems to be mostly there 
already, but, to our understanding, the last missing part for full 
TSO/GSO support is a way to tell the physical NIC to perform the TSO/GSO 
offload.

I've seen  the latest LPC 2022 talk from Jesper Dangaard Brouer 
regarding the planned XDP-Hints feature. But this was mainly about 
Checksum and VLAN offloads. Is supporting TSO/GSO also one of the goals 
you have in mind with these XDP-Hints proposals?

Will the multi-buffer and hints patches be all what's needed to make 
XDP_REDIRECT between a VM (without disabled offloads) and the host NIC 
possible, or are there more things missing in XDP that will become an 
issue in that use-case?

The "XDP Cloud-Provider" project page describes a very similar use-case 
to what we plan to do. What's the goal of this project?

We're very interested in the work on XDP-Hints and in the performance 
benefits that the offloading support could bring to XDP and I would be 
thankful if you could help us with some of our questions.

Best regards,
Marcus Wichelmann
Hetzner Cloud GmbH

[xdp-cloud] Re: Questions about Offloads and XDP-Hints regarding a Cloud-Provider Use-Case

[Jesper Dangaard Brouer]

On 28/09/2022 15.54, Marcus Wichelmann wrote:
> 
> I'm working for a cloud hosting provider and we're working on a new 
> XDP-based networking stack for our VM-Hosts that uses XDP to accelerate 
> the connectivity of our qemu/KVM VMs to the outside.
> 

Welcome to the community! Sounds like an excellent use-case and
opportunity for speeding up the RX packets from physical NIC into the
VM.  Good to hear someone (again) having this use-case. I've personally
not been focused on this use-case lately, mostly because community
members that I was interacting with changed jobs, away from cloud
hosting companies. Good to have a user back in this area!


> For this, we use XDP_REDIRECT to forward packets between the physical 
> host NIC and the VM tap devices. The main issue we have now is, that our 
> VM guests have some virtio NIC offloads enabled: rx/tx checksumming, 
> TSO/GSO, GRO and Scatter-Gather.

Supporting RX-checksumming is part of the plans for XDP-hints, although
virtio_net is not part of my initial patchset.

XDP-redirect with GRO and Scatter-Gather frames are part of the
multi-buff effort (Cc Lorenzo), but currently XDP_REDIRECT with
multi-buff is disabled (except for cpumap), because the lack of
XDP-feature bits, meaning we cannot determine (in kernel) if receiving
net_device supports multi-buff (Cc Kumar).

> Currently, these offloads (especially TSO/GSO) are incompatible with 
> XDP_REDIRECT and result in packets being dropped. Because disabling 
> these offloads in all our customer VMs is not a good option, we're 
> searching for ways to support these offloads with XDP.
> 

To David Ahern, didn't the kernel recently loosen up on having to
disable these offloads for KVM virtio_net?

My (long term) goal is to improve the situation and allow more offloads
to get enabled for KVM/virtio_net. But my current focus is on veth.


> The XDP multi-buffer support needed for TSO/GSO seems to be mostly there 

A subtle detail is that both XDP-hints and XDP multi-buff are needed to
get GRO/GSO kernel infra working.  For the kernel to construct GRO-SKB
based packets on XDP-redirected incoming xdp_frame's, the kernel code
requires both RX-csum and RX-hash before coalescing GRO frames.

> already, but, to our understanding, the last missing part for full 
> TSO/GSO support is a way to tell the physical NIC to perform the TSO/GSO 
> offload.
> 

The TSO/GSO side is usually the TX side.  The VM should be able to send
out normal TSO/GSO (multi-buffer) packets.  Or are you saying this also
gets disabled when enabling XDP on the virtio_net RX side?


> I've seen  the latest LPC 2022 talk from Jesper Dangaard Brouer 
> regarding the planned XDP-Hints feature. But this was mainly about 
> Checksum and VLAN offloads. Is supporting TSO/GSO also one of the goals 
> you have in mind with these XDP-Hints proposals?
> 

As mentioned TSO/GSO is TX side. We (Cc Magnus) also want to extend
XDP-hints to TX-side, to allow asking the HW to perform different
offloads. Lets land RX-side first.

> Will the multi-buffer and hints patches be all what's needed to make 
> XDP_REDIRECT between a VM (without disabled offloads) and the host NIC 
> possible, or are there more things missing in XDP that will become an 
> issue in that use-case?
> 

As hinted above, we also need net_device XDP-features to enable
redirecting XDP multi-buff frames.


> The "XDP Cloud-Provider" project page describes a very similar use-case 
> to what we plan to do. What's the goal of this project?
> 

Yes, this sounds VERY similar to your use-case.

I think you are referring to this:
  [1] https://xdp-project.net/areas/xdp-cloud-provider.html
  [2] https://github.com/xdp-project/xdp-cloud

We had two Cloud Hosting companies interested in this use-case and
started a "sub" xdp-project, with the intent of working together on
code[2] that implements concrete BPF tools, that functions as building
blocks that the individual companies can integrate into their systems,
separating out customer provisioning to the companies.
(p.s. this approach have worked well for xdp-cpumap-tc[3] scaling tool)

Unfortunately the Cloud-Provider project "died", because the engineers
from the Cloud Hosting companies got better job offers.  And other
engineers at these companies were apparently not motivated to takeover.


[3] https://github.com/xdp-project/xdp-cpumap-tc

> We're very interested in the work on XDP-Hints and in the performance 
> benefits that the offloading support could bring to XDP and I would be 
> thankful if you could help us with some of our questions.

Thanks for showing interest in XDP-hints, this is very motivating for me
personally to continue this work upstream.

--Jesper

[xdp-cloud] Re: Questions about Offloads and XDP-Hints regarding a Cloud-Provider Use-Case

[David Ahern]

On 9/28/22 11:07 AM, Jesper Dangaard Brouer wrote:
> 
> On 28/09/2022 15.54, Marcus Wichelmann wrote:
>>
>> I'm working for a cloud hosting provider and we're working on a new
>> XDP-based networking stack for our VM-Hosts that uses XDP to
>> accelerate the connectivity of our qemu/KVM VMs to the outside.
>>
> 
> Welcome to the community! Sounds like an excellent use-case and
> opportunity for speeding up the RX packets from physical NIC into the
> VM.  Good to hear someone (again) having this use-case. I've personally

+1

> not been focused on this use-case lately, mostly because community
> members that I was interacting with changed jobs, away from cloud
> hosting companies. Good to have a user back in this area!
> 
> 
>> For this, we use XDP_REDIRECT to forward packets between the physical
>> host NIC and the VM tap devices. The main issue we have now is, that
>> our VM guests have some virtio NIC offloads enabled: rx/tx
>> checksumming, TSO/GSO, GRO and Scatter-Gather.
> 
> Supporting RX-checksumming is part of the plans for XDP-hints, although
> virtio_net is not part of my initial patchset.

Lorenzo and I both had versions of a patch to propagate rx csum
validation to the VM on xdp redirect. I do not recall a version after
this one:

https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/cover.1622222367.git.lorenzo@kernel.org/

and I lost of track of what change is needed for it to go in.

> 
> XDP-redirect with GRO and Scatter-Gather frames are part of the
> multi-buff effort (Cc Lorenzo), but currently XDP_REDIRECT with
> multi-buff is disabled (except for cpumap), because the lack of
> XDP-feature bits, meaning we cannot determine (in kernel) if receiving
> net_device supports multi-buff (Cc Kumar).
> 
>> Currently, these offloads (especially TSO/GSO) are incompatible with
>> XDP_REDIRECT and result in packets being dropped. Because disabling
>> these offloads in all our customer VMs is not a good option, we're
>> searching for ways to support these offloads with XDP.
>>
> 
> To David Ahern, didn't the kernel recently loosen up on having to
> disable these offloads for KVM virtio_net?

not that I am aware. Still need tx offloads disabled.


This summarizes what I was looking into back in 2020, along with the
current state of XDP for VM use case:

https://legacy.netdevconf.info/0x14/pub/slides/24/netdev-0x14-XDP-and-the-cloud.pdf

source code is still on github too.

[xdp-cloud] Re: Questions about Offloads and XDP-Hints regarding a Cloud-Provider Use-Case

[Jason Wang]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2022 at 6:37 AM Lorenzo Bianconi
<lorenzo.bianconi@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> > On 9/28/22 11:07 AM, Jesper Dangaard Brouer wrote:
> > >
> > > On 28/09/2022 15.54, Marcus Wichelmann wrote:
> > >>
> > >> I'm working for a cloud hosting provider and we're working on a new
> > >> XDP-based networking stack for our VM-Hosts that uses XDP to
> > >> accelerate the connectivity of our qemu/KVM VMs to the outside.
> > >>
> > >
> > > Welcome to the community! Sounds like an excellent use-case and
> > > opportunity for speeding up the RX packets from physical NIC into the
> > > VM.  Good to hear someone (again) having this use-case. I've personally
> >
> > +1

+1. This is somehow what I wanted to achieve in the past.

> >
> > > not been focused on this use-case lately, mostly because community
> > > members that I was interacting with changed jobs, away from cloud
> > > hosting companies. Good to have a user back in this area!
> > >
> > >
> > >> For this, we use XDP_REDIRECT to forward packets between the physical
> > >> host NIC and the VM tap devices. The main issue we have now is, that
> > >> our VM guests have some virtio NIC offloads enabled: rx/tx
> > >> checksumming, TSO/GSO, GRO and Scatter-Gather.
> > >
> > > Supporting RX-checksumming is part of the plans for XDP-hints, although
> > > virtio_net is not part of my initial patchset.
> >
> > Lorenzo and I both had versions of a patch to propagate rx csum
> > validation to the VM on xdp redirect. I do not recall a version after
> > this one:
> >
> > https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/cover.1622222367.git.lorenzo@kernel.org/
> >
> > and I lost of track of what change is needed for it to go in.
>
> iirc the blocking point was the missing CHECKSUM_COMPLETE support (we support
> just CHECKSUM_UNNECESSARY). We can conver it with XDP hw-hints.

How about other metadata like gso_type, gso_segs, csum_start and
csum_offset etc? This looks like a must for GSO to work even if
multi-buffer is supported.

Thanks

>
> Regards,
> Lorenzo
>
> >
> > >
> > > XDP-redirect with GRO and Scatter-Gather frames are part of the
> > > multi-buff effort (Cc Lorenzo), but currently XDP_REDIRECT with
> > > multi-buff is disabled (except for cpumap), because the lack of
> > > XDP-feature bits, meaning we cannot determine (in kernel) if receiving
> > > net_device supports multi-buff (Cc Kumar).
> > >
> > >> Currently, these offloads (especially TSO/GSO) are incompatible with
> > >> XDP_REDIRECT and result in packets being dropped. Because disabling
> > >> these offloads in all our customer VMs is not a good option, we're
> > >> searching for ways to support these offloads with XDP.
> > >>
> > >
> > > To David Ahern, didn't the kernel recently loosen up on having to
> > > disable these offloads for KVM virtio_net?
> >
> > not that I am aware. Still need tx offloads disabled.
> >
> >
> > This summarizes what I was looking into back in 2020, along with the
> > current state of XDP for VM use case:
> >
> > https://legacy.netdevconf.info/0x14/pub/slides/24/netdev-0x14-XDP-and-the-cloud.pdf
> >
> > source code is still on github too.
> >

[xdp-cloud] Re: Questions about Offloads and XDP-Hints regarding a Cloud-Provider Use-Case

[David Ahern]

On 9/28/22 7:14 PM, Jason Wang wrote:
> How about other metadata like gso_type, gso_segs, csum_start and
> csum_offset etc? This looks like a must for GSO to work even if
> multi-buffer is supported.

XDP redirect on Rx, packet by packet, only needs checksum valid data.

Tx and GSO is a much bigger problem.

[xdp-cloud] Re: Questions about Offloads and XDP-Hints regarding a Cloud-Provider Use-Case

[Marcus Wichelmann]

Am 28.09.22 um 20:07 schrieb Jesper Dangaard Brouer:
> 
> On 28/09/2022 15.54, Marcus Wichelmann wrote:
>>
>> I'm working for a cloud hosting provider and we're working on a new 
>> XDP-based networking stack for our VM-Hosts that uses XDP to 
>> accelerate the connectivity of our qemu/KVM VMs to the outside.
>>
> 
> Welcome to the community!

Thank you!

> Sounds like an excellent use-case and
> opportunity for speeding up the RX packets from physical NIC into the
> VM.  Good to hear someone (again) having this use-case. I've personally
> not been focused on this use-case lately, mostly because community
> members that I was interacting with changed jobs, away from cloud
> hosting companies. Good to have a user back in this area!

Good to hear! Also, we'll probably not be the last ones coming up with 
this use-case. ;)


>> For this, we use XDP_REDIRECT to forward packets between the physical 
>> host NIC and the VM tap devices. The main issue we have now is, that 
>> our VM guests have some virtio NIC offloads enabled: rx/tx 
>> checksumming, TSO/GSO, GRO and Scatter-Gather.
> 
> Supporting RX-checksumming is part of the plans for XDP-hints, although
> virtio_net is not part of my initial patchset.

Great!

> XDP-redirect with GRO and Scatter-Gather frames are part of the
> multi-buff effort (Cc Lorenzo), but currently XDP_REDIRECT with
> multi-buff is disabled (except for cpumap), because the lack of
> XDP-feature bits, meaning we cannot determine (in kernel) if receiving
> net_device supports multi-buff (Cc Kumar).

Can this also be solved with XDP-Hints or is this an unrelated issue?

>> The XDP multi-buffer support needed for TSO/GSO seems to be mostly there 
> 
> A subtle detail is that both XDP-hints and XDP multi-buff are needed to
> get GRO/GSO kernel infra working.  For the kernel to construct GRO-SKB
> based packets on XDP-redirected incoming xdp_frame's, the kernel code
> requires both RX-csum and RX-hash before coalescing GRO frames.
> 
>> already, but, to our understanding, the last missing part for full 
>> TSO/GSO support is a way to tell the physical NIC to perform the 
>> TSO/GSO offload.
>>
> 
> The TSO/GSO side is usually the TX side.  The VM should be able to send
> out normal TSO/GSO (multi-buffer) packets.

Currently the VM sends out multi-buffer packets, but after redirecting 
them, they are probably not getting segmented on the way out of the 
physical NIC. Or, as you wrote earlier, the XDP multi-buffer support 
isn't even used there and the packet just gets truncated on the way into 
XDP.
I've not exactly traced that down yet, but you probably know better than 
me what's happening there.

Because of that, the TX side offloads are more critical to us because we 
cannot easily disable them in the VMs. The RX side is less of an issue, 
because we have control over the physical NIC configuration and could 
temporarily disable all offloads there, until XDP supports them (which 
would of course be better). So RX offloads are very nice to have, but 
missing TX offloads are a show-stopper for this use-case, if we don't 
find a way to disable the offloads on all customer VMs.

 > Or are you saying this also gets disabled when enabling XDP on the
 > virtio_net RX side?

I'm not sure what you mean with that. What gets disabled?

>> I've seen  the latest LPC 2022 talk from Jesper Dangaard Brouer 
>> regarding the planned XDP-Hints feature. But this was mainly about 
>> Checksum and VLAN offloads. Is supporting TSO/GSO also one of the 
>> goals you have in mind with these XDP-Hints proposals?
>>
> 
> As mentioned TSO/GSO is TX side. We (Cc Magnus) also want to extend
> XDP-hints to TX-side, to allow asking the HW to perform different
> offloads. Lets land RX-side first.

Makes sense, thanks for clarifying your roadmap!

>> The "XDP Cloud-Provider" project page describes a very similar 
>> use-case to what we plan to do. What's the goal of this project?
>>
> 
> Yes, this sounds VERY similar to your use-case.
> 
> I think you are referring to this:
>   [1] https://xdp-project.net/areas/xdp-cloud-provider.html
>   [2] https://github.com/xdp-project/xdp-cloud

The GitHub Link is a 404. Maybe this repository is private-only?

> We had two Cloud Hosting companies interested in this use-case and
> started a "sub" xdp-project, with the intent of working together on
> code[2] that implements concrete BPF tools, that functions as building
> blocks that the individual companies can integrate into their systems,
> separating out customer provisioning to the companies.
> (p.s. this approach have worked well for xdp-cpumap-tc[3] scaling tool)

I wonder what these common building blocks could be. I think this would 
be mostly just a program that calls XDP-Redirect and also some XDP-Hints 
handling in the future. This could also be demonstrated as an example 
program.
While looking at our current XDP-Stack design draft, I think everything 
beyond that is highly specific to how the network infrastructure of the 
cloud hosting environment is designed and will probably be hard to apply 
to the requirements of other providers.

But of course, having a simple reference implementation of a XDP 
datapath that demonstrates how XDP can be used to connect VMs to the 
outside, would still be very useful. For documentation purposes, maybe 
not su much as a framework.

>> We're very interested in the work on XDP-Hints and in the performance 
>> benefits that the offloading support could bring to XDP and I would be 
>> thankful if you could help us with some of our questions.
> 
> Thanks for showing interest in XDP-hints, this is very motivating for me
> personally to continue this work upstream.

Even though I'm not familar enough with the kernel networking code to 
comment on the related proposals, please let me know when there is 
something else we can do to help getting things upstreamed.

Marcus

[xdp-cloud] Re: Questions about Offloads and XDP-Hints regarding a Cloud-Provider Use-Case

[Jesper Dangaard Brouer]

(Answered inline, below)

On 29/09/2022 15.16, Marcus Wichelmann wrote:
> Am 28.09.22 um 20:07 schrieb Jesper Dangaard Brouer:
>>
>> On 28/09/2022 15.54, Marcus Wichelmann wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm working for a cloud hosting provider and we're working on a new 
>>> XDP-based networking stack for our VM-Hosts that uses XDP to 
>>> accelerate the connectivity of our qemu/KVM VMs to the outside.
>>>
>>
>> Welcome to the community!
> 
> Thank you!
> 
>> Sounds like an excellent use-case and
>> opportunity for speeding up the RX packets from physical NIC into the
>> VM.  Good to hear someone (again) having this use-case. I've personally
>> not been focused on this use-case lately, mostly because community
>> members that I was interacting with changed jobs, away from cloud
>> hosting companies. Good to have a user back in this area!
> 
> Good to hear! Also, we'll probably not be the last ones coming up with 
> this use-case. ;)
> 

Yes, and remember to look at the effort done by people before...

I urge you to read David Ahern's slides:
 
https://legacy.netdevconf.info/0x14/pub/slides/24/netdev-0x14-XDP-and-the-cloud.pdf

It is a details step-by-step explanation of your use-case, along with
the pitfalls and gotchas.  If you hit an issue, do remember to bring it
to the attention of the community (e.g. xdp-newbies), then lurking
kernel engineers likely will get motivated to fix these issues upstream.
(Like slides explain improvements for redirects in kernel v5.4 + v5.6 + 
v5.8)

>>> For this, we use XDP_REDIRECT to forward packets between the physical 
>>> host NIC and the VM tap devices. The main issue we have now is, that 
>>> our VM guests have some virtio NIC offloads enabled: rx/tx 
>>> checksumming, TSO/GSO, GRO and Scatter-Gather.
>>
>> Supporting RX-checksumming is part of the plans for XDP-hints, although
>> virtio_net is not part of my initial patchset.
> 
> Great!

It should be trivial to add to virtio_net.

>> XDP-redirect with GRO and Scatter-Gather frames are part of the
>> multi-buff effort (Cc Lorenzo), but currently XDP_REDIRECT with
>> multi-buff is disabled (except for cpumap), because the lack of
>> XDP-feature bits, meaning we cannot determine (in kernel) if receiving
>> net_device supports multi-buff (Cc Kumar).
> 
> Can this also be solved with XDP-Hints or is this an unrelated issue?
> 

This is unrelated to XDP-hints.

>>> The XDP multi-buffer support needed for TSO/GSO seems to be mostly there 
>>
>> A subtle detail is that both XDP-hints and XDP multi-buff are needed to
>> get GRO/GSO kernel infra working.  For the kernel to construct GRO-SKB
>> based packets on XDP-redirected incoming xdp_frame's, the kernel code
>> requires both RX-csum and RX-hash before coalescing GRO frames.
>>
>>> already, but, to our understanding, the last missing part for full 
>>> TSO/GSO support is a way to tell the physical NIC to perform the 
>>> TSO/GSO offload.
>>>
>>
>> The TSO/GSO side is usually the TX side.  The VM should be able to send
>> out normal TSO/GSO (multi-buffer) packets.
> 
> Currently the VM sends out multi-buffer packets, but after redirecting 
> them, they are probably not getting segmented on the way out of the 
> physical NIC. Or, as you wrote earlier, the XDP multi-buffer support 
> isn't even used there and the packet just gets truncated on the way into 
> XDP.
> I've not exactly traced that down yet, but you probably know better than 
> me what's happening there.

XDP program on tap-device will likely cause drops of multi-buffer 
packets (send out by VM).

(1) First of all this XDP-tap program need to use the newer XDP program 
sub-type that known about multi-buffer packets.

(2) I'm not sure XDP-tap (virio_net) got multi-buffer support.
  Lorenzo or Jason do you know?

> Because of that, the TX side offloads are more critical to us because we 
> cannot easily disable them in the VMs. The RX side is less of an issue, 
> because we have control over the physical NIC configuration and could 
> temporarily disable all offloads there, until XDP supports them (which 
> would of course be better). So RX offloads are very nice to have, but 
> missing TX offloads are a show-stopper for this use-case, if we don't 
> find a way to disable the offloads on all customer VMs.
> 
>  > Or are you saying this also gets disabled when enabling XDP on the
>  > virtio_net RX side?
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean with that. What gets disabled?
> 

See Ahern's slide "Redirecting VM Egress Traffic".

The libvirt config (or Qemu/kvm params) currently need to disables many
of the offloads for XDP-on-tap to work.

IMHO this is something we kernel developers need to fix/improve.
(Cc Jason + Lorenzo)

>>> I've seen  the latest LPC 2022 talk from Jesper Dangaard Brouer 
>>> regarding the planned XDP-Hints feature. But this was mainly about 
>>> Checksum and VLAN offloads. Is supporting TSO/GSO also one of the 
>>> goals you have in mind with these XDP-Hints proposals?
>>>
>>
>> As mentioned TSO/GSO is TX side. We (Cc Magnus) also want to extend
>> XDP-hints to TX-side, to allow asking the HW to perform different
>> offloads. Lets land RX-side first.
> 
> Makes sense, thanks for clarifying your roadmap!
> 

For your own roadmap, waiting for "TX-XDP-hints" is likely problematic.

Thus, I would likely recommend NOT XDP-redirecting (TCP) traffic coming
from the VMs, which will hit the XDP-tap BPF program.  The XDP-tap
program could selectively XDP-redirect the UDP packets (if your
measurements show it to be faster).

Start with XDP redirecting from the physical NIC device into the VMs.
The XDP-hints coming from physical NIC device should be trivially to
convert into the format KVM needs.
Looking at kernel code we need to populate struct virtio_net_hdr (which
is inside struct tun_xdp_hdr).


>>> The "XDP Cloud-Provider" project page describes a very similar 
>>> use-case to what we plan to do. What's the goal of this project?
>>>
>>
>> Yes, this sounds VERY similar to your use-case.
>>
>> I think you are referring to this:
>>   [1] https://xdp-project.net/areas/xdp-cloud-provider.html
>>   [2] https://github.com/xdp-project/xdp-cloud
> 
> The GitHub Link is a 404. Maybe this repository is private-only?

Yes, sorry about that git repo is marked private, because the project 
didn't take off.


>> We had two Cloud Hosting companies interested in this use-case and
>> started a "sub" xdp-project, with the intent of working together on
>> code[2] that implements concrete BPF tools, that functions as building
>> blocks that the individual companies can integrate into their systems,
>> separating out customer provisioning to the companies.
>> (p.s. this approach have worked well for xdp-cpumap-tc[3] scaling tool)
> 
> I wonder what these common building blocks could be. I think this would 
> be mostly just a program that calls XDP-Redirect and also some XDP-Hints 
> handling in the future. This could also be demonstrated as an example 
> program.

Sure.
I recommend you start with coding an eBPF example program, and if you
want my help please base it on https://github.com/xdp-project/bpf-examples

> While looking at our current XDP-Stack design draft, I think everything 
> beyond that is highly specific to how the network infrastructure of the 
> cloud hosting environment is designed and will probably be hard to apply 
> to the requirements of other providers.
> 

Hmm... I kind of disagree, but that should not stop you.
I still encourage to decouple customer/VM provisioning in your design.

> But of course, having a simple reference implementation of a XDP 
> datapath that demonstrates how XDP can be used to connect VMs to the 
> outside, would still be very useful. For documentation purposes, maybe 
> not su much as a framework.

Great, lets start with PoC/MVP as sub-dir under:
  https://github.com/xdp-project/bpf-examples

If we can iterate over a public 'xdp-cloud' bpf-example, then the
community can easier reproduce the issues that devel process brings up.

--Jesper