When Hardware Offload Goes Silent: The Case of the Orphaned TC Flowers
In large-scale cloud infrastructure, few things sound as compelling on paper as hardware offloading. When you are running Genestack—powering enterprise OpenStack clouds orchestrated on top of Kubernetes with Kube-OVN and Open vSwitch (OVS)—encapsulating Geneve overlay traffic and tracking connection state can consume measurable CPU cycles across a busy fleet. Offloading those flow tables and match-action rules directly into the physical NIC silicon is the holy grail: line-rate throughput, near-zero CPU overhead, and microsecond packet handling.
Until your network cards decide they cannot actually handle it.