Linux Kernel Support for IOAM Direct Exporting

In Situ Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (IOAM) provides a way to collect telemetry data on devices, e.g., switches and routers, in so-called limited domains (e.g., a datacenter or a service provider). Recently standardized in the IETF, IOAM has been developed with various operation modes (i.e., option-types) in order to be suitable for as many potential use cases as possible. One of the option-types, namely the Pre-allocated Trace Option-Type (PTO), has already been implemented in the Linux kernel and is part of the mainline tree since version 5.15. IOAM comes with another option-type, namely the IOAM Direct Exporting (DEX). It allows each network device on the path to locally aggregate and/or export telemetry data towards one or more collector(s). This paper proposes the very first implementation of IOAM DEX in the Linux kernel, with support in ubiquitous user space tools. The paper discusses our implementation and presents performance results of our implementation. Our source code is publicly available.