DASH Workgroup Community Update 5/14/2025

[Kristina Moore]

Hello DASH Community –thank you for your time last Wednesday. 

In our call @Ramesh Raghupathy (Cisco) covered the HLD for SmartSwitch DPU graceful shutdown PR1991 for us.  XFlow Research asked for further clarification around working within the SONiC repo for the contribution to counters for the dash-sonic-hld to differentiate DASH counters (DPU, ENI, Global for example) vs. Switch counters.  @Prabhat Aravind suggested following existing PRs in the SONiC Utilities repo that added show commands as a reference for implementing DASH show commands. 

And lastly, we could really use help with optimization of the ASIC DB to reduce memory footprint for DPUs; there has been previous optimization work done for App DB that could be leveraged if anyone would like to help out.  The previous work for App DB involved (for example) moving from string-based key-value pairs to protobuf, and a similar approach is needed for ASIC DB to handle the increased number of objects with DPUs    
        

In Summary (full list below), since the last Community call we have:

6 PRs Completed (+3)

9 in To Do (+/- 0)

8 in Draft (+/- 0)

26 in Progress (+7)

3 Awaiting Review (+/- 0)

 

Just a reminder that we would encourage/invite Community members to present to the Community (test runs or progress, new scenarios, etc…), just ‘r’ to let me know, or generate a PR in the repo.

The DASH YouTube channel link is here to [UCNE3zNwJqcEyLX9ejKrLtUA]subscribe / access WG content (and click the bell to receive notifications). 

Thank you for your time/contributions – see you on 5/21/2025

 

Meeting Title:  SONiC-DASH-Workgroup Community Meeting #148

Attendees (16):

DASH Group to join: https://groups.google.com/g/sonic-dash

DASH-Test-Workgroup Group to join: https://groups.google.com/g/sonic-dash-test-workgroup

Linux Foundation list: https://lists.sonicfoundation.dev/g/SONiC-Dash

 

Abdul Rouff - NVidia	Kanza Latif - XFlowResearch	Philipp Keydel - Synogate	Satya Valli Rama - AMD
Bud Grise - XSightLabs	Kristina Moore - MSFT	Prabhat Aravind - MSFT	Veerappan, Senthilnathan - AMD
Don Ewald	Marian Pritsak - NVidia	Ramesh Raghupathy - Cisco	Wenchung Wang - Cisco
Guy Duryee - Cisco	murali Venkateshaiah - Cisco	Rimsha Syed - XFlowResearch	Yakiv Huryk - NVidia

 

 

 TL:DR DASH Community Notes 😊  

• HA Testing:  updated the team on the ongoing HA testing with Keysight
• Max Member Size Parameter: and the resolution of the Max member size parameter question from last week
• HAMgrD: ongoing effort with HaMgrD.
• Show Commands for DASH: Kanza from the Xflow research team sought guidance on starting with show commands for DASH, and Prabhat provided information about the SONiC wiki and the possibility of creating new directories within SONiC Utilities for DASH-specific commands.
• Existing Contributors: Prabhat mentioned that there are already contributors from the Xflow research team, such as Wajahat and Mohammad, who have previously worked on SONiC.
• Path for DASH: Kanza sought clarification on the specific path or starting point for DASH within SONiC, asking whether the utilities for DASH need to be in the SONiC utilities.
• Separate Directories: Prabhat explained that if the commands are specific to DASH and DPUs, a new directory can be created within the SONiC Utilities repo. However, if the commands are generic enough, they can use the existing layout in SONiC utilities.
• Configuration Commands for DASH: Kanza Latif inquired about the configuration commands for DASH, and Prabhat explained that if the commands are specific to DASH and DPUs, a new directory can be created within SONiC Utilities.
• Configuration Commands: XFlow asked about the configuration commands for DASH, in order to understand where these commands should be implemented and whether separate folders are needed for DASH-related utilities.
• Flow of Code: Prabhat clarified that the flow of code for DASH show commands should be similar to other show commands in SONiC, and if the commands are specific to DASH, a new directory can be created within SONiC Utilities.
• Existing PRs: Prabhat suggested following existing PRs in the SONiC Utilities repo that added show commands as a reference for implementing DASH show commands.
• DPU Graceful Shutdown: Ramesh from Cisco discussed the implementation of a graceful shutdown sequence for DPUs, explaining the need for proper pre-shutdown operations and the complexity of the implementation due to the isolation between the container and the host.
• Current Reboot Process: currently a graceful reboot sequence is implemented for DPUs, which involves shutting down all services and platform-related operations before rebooting.
• Shutdown Complexity: Ramesh highlighted the complexity of implementing a graceful shutdown due to the isolation between the container (P1) and the host, which prevents direct communication for shutdown operations.
• Sequence Diagram: provided a sequence diagram showing the interaction between PMON and the host, detailing the process of sending requests and receiving responses through pipes to manage the shutdown sequence.
• Pre-Shutdown Operations: described the pre-shutdown operations, including notifying clients like BFD and IHA manager to bring down services and performing platform-specific operations like flushing EMMC.
• Implementation Workflow: outlined the workflow for implementing the graceful shutdown, involving config change events, GNOI requests, and subsequent operations to ensure a proper shutdown of the DPU.
• ASIC DB Optimization: Kristina and Prabhat discussed the need for ASIC DB optimization to reduce memory footprint, with Prabhat mentioning the previous optimization work done for App DB and the need for community support.
• Previous Work: the previous optimization for App DB involved moving from string-based key-value pairs to protobuf, and a similar approach is needed for ASIC DB to handle the increased number of objects with DPUs.
• Community Support: Prabhat emphasized the need for community support to implement the necessary optimizations for ASIC DB
• Profile Data: Murali asked if there is any profile data or metrics available to understand the current memory footprint of ASIC DB, and Prabhat mentioned that there might be data available from the App DB optimization that could be a starting point.
• Issue 279 and SWSS Attributes: TCS inquired about the status of Issue 279 related to adding attributes to the SWSS table, and Kristina will follow up with Chris Sommers for clarification.

 

Sticky for Links/Reference:
DASH Groups to join to receive Invites, Meeting Notes, and Comms	DASH: https://groups.google.com/g/sonic-dash     DASH-Test-Workgroup Group: https://groups.google.com/g/sonic-dash-test-workgroup   Linux Foundation list: https://lists.sonicfoundation.dev/g/SONiC-Dash	If anyone knows other people who would like info re: our community, please have them joins these groups for receive Comms, etc…
Links to Recording	Teams/Sharepoint: ​Recap: SONiC-DASH Workgroup Community Meeting Wednesday, May 14   DASH Community YouTube: https://youtu.be/Z3o90d3lqZU HA moved to SmartSwitch LF group on Thursdays YouTube Behavioral Model: Conflict, rescheduling required	5/14/2025 DASH Community Call; please request access via the link if you are not able to view/listen
Azure DASH GitHub Repo:	https://github.com/sonic-net/DASH
Test/Docs folder:	https://github.com/sonic-net/DASH/blob/main/test/docs/dash-test-workflow-saithrift.md	Ideal test workflow is here, converted to .md
SAI Thrift	SAI Thrift PR	Client server needed for testing
P4	https://opennetworking.org/p4/ and https://p4.org/working-groups/	Open source, domain-specific programming language for network devices, specifying packet processing for data plane devices (switches, routers, NICs, filters, etc.)
PINS	https://opennetworking.org/pins/
PNA consortium spec	https://p4.org/p4-spec/docs/PNA-v0.5.0.html	An architecture describing the structure and common capabilities of network interface controller (NIC) devices which process packets transiting one or more interfaces and a host system. Describes the structure and capabilities of the pipeline, and a user program, which specifies the functionality of the programmable blocks within that pipeline. For more information, see the P4 Language Consortium specifications
IPDK	Infrastructure Programmer Development Kit (ipdk.io) and https://github.com/ipdk-io/ipdk-io.github.io	IPDK is an open source, vendor agnostic framework of drivers and APIs for infrastructure offload and management which runs on a CPU, IPU, DPU or switch. IPDK runs in Linux and uses a set of well-established tools such as DPDK and P4 to enable network virtualization.
bmv2	https://github.com/p4lang/behavioral-model	The second version of the reference P4 software switch, nicknamed bmv2 (for behavioral model version 2). The software switch is written in C++11. It takes as input a JSON file generated from your P4 program by a P4 compiler and interprets it to implement the packet-processing behavior specified by that P4 program
DPDK	https://www.dpdk.org/	DPDK is the Data Plane Development Kit which consists of libraries to accelerate packet processing workloads running on a wide variety of CPU architectures.
Linux Foundation SmartSwitch	https://lists.sonicfoundation.dev/g/sonic-smartswitch/calendar

  

Thank you again for your participation…

Kristina Moore MBA, M.S., CISSP - Azure Core Principal PM / DASH & SmartSwitch
Office: 425-722-7720     Mobile: 425-876-2040     Email: kri...@microsoft.com
DASH Group to join: https://groups.google.com/g/sonic-dash    
DASH-Test-Workgroup Group to join: https://groups.google.com/g/sonic-dash-test-workgroup
Linux Foundation:  https://lists.sonicfoundation.dev/g/SONiC-Dash