Nvidia ConnectX-7 by numbers
Summary
This article documents fastSwan's benchmarking of Nvidia ConnectX-7 NICs using IPsec offload and NIC based flower mode. It compares XDP based forwarding versus hardware offload across several scenarios (baseline XDP fib lookup, XDP hairpin, outbound flower, and full flower) and uses multiple TRex profiles to measure throughput and latency. It discusses hardware setup, kernel driver changes, and patches to mlx5 to enable IPsec and flower coexistence, noting tradeoffs between host CPU load and latency versus maximum wire speed. The piece also covers cross port topology, tunnel counts, and a proposed hybrid approach combining hardware offload with host based XDP for best balance.