Part VI Telco features configuration #

The real-time kernel image is not necessarily better than a standard kernel. It is a different kernel tuned to a specific use case. The real-time kernel is tuned for lower latency at the cost of throughput. The real-time kernel is not recommended for general purpose use, but in our case, this is the…

Configuring the appropriate kernel arguments is essential for optimizing performance, achieving low latency, and ensuring successful cluster deployment for telco workloads. While some parameters are designed specifically to enable the real-time kernel to function optimally, this section applies to b…

CPU pinning, also known as processor affinity, is the technique of binding a process or thread to a specific CPU core, preventing the operating system’s scheduler from moving it. By ensuring a process always runs on the same core, it benefits from faster access to data that remains in that core’s ca…

Enable CPU pinning in your RKE2 cluster by editing RKE2 config file. Add below kubelet arguments in /etc/rancher/rke2/config.yaml file. Make sure specifying the housekeeping CPU cores in kubelet-reserved and system-reserved arguments:

Cilium is the default CNI plug-in for SUSE Telco Cloud. To enable Cilium on RKE2 cluster as the default plug-in, the following configuration is required in the /etc/rancher/rke2/config.yaml file:

SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) allows a single physical device, such as a network adapter, to separate its resources across multiple PCIe hardware functions. This enables direct resource access for various applications.

DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) is a set of libraries and drivers for fast packet processing. It is used to accelerate packet processing workloads running on a wide variety of CPU architectures. The DPDK includes data plane libraries and optimized network interface controller (NIC) drivers for the…

As communications service providers move from 4G to 5G networks, many are adopting virtualized radio access network (vRAN) architectures for higher channel capacity and easier deployment of edge-based services and applications. vRAN solutions are ideally located to deliver low-latency services with …

When a process uses RAM, the CPU marks it as used by that process. For efficiency, the CPU allocates RAM in chunks 4K bytes is the default value on many platforms. Those chunks are named pages. Pages can be swapped to disk, etc.

Non-Uniform Memory Access or Non-Uniform Memory Architecture (NUMA) is a physical memory design used in SMP (multiprocessors) architecture, where the memory access time depends on the memory location relative to a processor. Under NUMA, a processor can access its own local memory faster than non-loc…

MetalLB is a load-balancer implementation for bare-metal Kubernetes clusters, using standard routing protocols like L2 and BGP as advertisement protocols. It is a network load balancer that can be used to expose services in a Kubernetes cluster to the outside world due to the need to use Kubernetes …

Containerd can be configured to connect to private registries and use them to pull private images on each node.

Precision Time Protocol (PTP) is a network protocol developed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to enable sub-microsecond time synchronization in a computer network. Since its inception and for a couple of decades now, PTP has been in use in many industries. It has rece…

From Stream Control Transmission Protocol - Wikipedia