BlueField‑2 + VyOS: Benefits over a traditional NIC?

General questions
1

Hi,

I’m working with an NVIDIA BlueField‑2 DPU and would like to integrate it with VyOS as a router/firewall.

My questions are:

  • Can VyOS take advantage of the BlueField‑2 hardware offload capabilities (e.g., IPsec/TLS offload, flow steering, OVS/DPDK, etc.), or will it just treat it as a standard NIC?
  • If so, what configurations or integrations would be required (DOCA/DPDK, SR‑IOV, switchdev)?
  • What practical improvements could I expect compared to using a traditional NIC (latency, throughput, encryption, segmentation, etc.)?

I’d appreciate any experiences or documentation, especially from anyone who has already tried BlueField with VyOS.

Thanks

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2

Yu-Chiang Huang made a series of posts on LinkedIn about his work trying to get VyOS running on a BlueField DPU.

In short, a lot of things can be made work, but requires some manual patching and extra steps.

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3

Thanks @Nicolas

Hi @Ethernaut
This is Date, (Yu-Chiang)
If VyOS or let’s say nftable can leverage BlueField with the hardware offload features, you can get better performance to forward L2/L3 traffic and NAT in BF2 with lower CPU usage. (much lower)

Currently, VyOS will need lots of patches to support BF, and still need some NVIDIA support to do some debugging while there are still some issues.

As I understand currently, VyOS doesn’t have plan to support ARM64 platform, that will need more effort to port to BF platform as well.

I’m sorry I don’t really have time to do the doc or remove the trademark for release. If you need something, you can ping me in Linkedin (the link that Nicolas post)

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