Deploy SD-Core User Plane with HugePages

This guide covers how to deploy the User Plane Function (UPF) with huge pages using the sdcore-user-plane Juju bundle.

Requirements

• A Kubernetes host which meets the following requirements:

  • CPU that supports AVX2, RDRAND and PDPE1GB instructions (Intel Haswell, AMD Excavator or equivalent)

  • LoadBalancer with 1 available address for the UPF

  • Multus CNI enabled

• Juju >= 3.1/stable

• A Juju controller bootstrapped onto the Kubernetes host

• Juju model created, named user-plane

Enable HugePages on the host

As root user, edit the bootloader configuration of the OS (/etc/default/grub) appending the following command to the kernel command-line parameters (GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT):

default_hugepagesz=1G

Then update the bootloader:

update-grub

Allocate 2 HugePages of 1Gi, for a total of 2Gi HugePages, and make it persistent:

echo "vm.nr_hugepages=2" | tee /etc/sysctl.d/hugepages.conf

Then reboot the host.

Deploy SD-Core User Plane

Create a Juju overlay file.

cat << EOF > upf-overlay.yaml
applications:
  upf:
    options:
      enable-hugepages: True
EOF

Deploy the sdcore-user-plane-k8s bundle.

juju deploy sdcore-user-plane-k8s --trust --channel=1.3/beta --overlay upf-overlay.yaml

Validate HugePages support

Check the bessd container logs which indicate that the HugePages are reserved.

$ kubectl logs -f  sdcore-upf-0 -c  bessd -n user-plane | grep -i "huge-unlink"
2023-10-26T12:33:35.495Z [bessd] I1026 12:33:35.495568    54 dpdk.cc:169] Initializing DPDK EAL with options: ["bessd", "--main-lcore", "127", "--lcore", "127@0-31", "--no-shconf", "--legacy-mem", "--socket-mem", "1024", "--huge-unlink"]

Besides, PacketPool is created with name DpdkPacketPool in bessd container logs if HugePages is enabled.

$ kubectl logs -f  sdcore-upf-0 -c  bessd -n user-plane  | grep -i pool
2023-10-26T12:33:35.705Z [bessd] I1026 12:33:35.705854    54 packet_pool.cc:49] Creating DpdkPacketPool for 262144 packets on node 0