23.07

Reference Architecture 23.07

New Components/Features:
- Support for 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors requires the NDA version of the Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT) drivers
- Support for 12th Gen Intel® Core™ processors
- Support for Intel Atom® x6000e series processors
- Support for 5G O-RAN security with NETCONF server/client authentication (Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX))
- Support Rancher RKE2 Kubernetes distribution for the access edge configuration profile with Ubuntu. (v1.26.2+rke2r1)
- Support for Intel® FPGA SmartNIC WSN6050 Platform for video production
- Enabled Intel® Infrastructure Processing Unit (Intel® IPU) ASIC E2000 card and made it available in the host machine, which requires the NDA version of image
- Support for Intel® SGX in VMRA by upgrading QEMU and libvirt
- Support for Key Management Reference Application (KMRA) in Virtual Machine Reference Architecture (VMRA)
- Support for KMRA on 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors on production SKUs
- Implemented Intel® SGX-enabled Istio in VMs
- Support for Cilium eBPF Dataplane on Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
- Updates to Kubernetes version and tools used to deploy on Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Amazon Web Service (AWS) Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) in Cloud Reference System Architecture
- Implemented support and option for Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT) in-tree versus out-of-tree drivers and libraries
- Integrated Intel® oneAPI Base Toolkit (Base Kit) 2023.1 and Intel® AI Analytics Toolkit (AI Kit) 2023.1.1
- Integrated FFmpeg with cartwheel (Intel GitHub 2023q1 release)
- Added two Configuration Profiles:
    On-Premises SW Defined Factory Configuration Profile for industrial use cases
    On-Premises VSS Configuration Profile for Video Structuring Server (VSS) use cases
- RHEL 9.2 as base OS
- RHEL 9.2 RT as base OS
- Ubuntu 22.04.2 as base OS

Updates/Changes:
- Version upgraded for the vast majority of Reference System components (See elsewhere in this document for complete BOM and versions)
- Notable updates:
    FlexRAN™ to v23.03
    Kubernetes* to v1.26.3
    CPU Control Plane Plugin for Kubernetes* to v0.1.2
    Telemetry Aware Scheduling to v0.5.0
    GPU Aware Scheduling to v0.5.2
    Intel® Power Manager to v2.2
    Service Mesh Istio to v1.18.1
    Intel® Managed Distribution of Istio* Service Mesh to v1.18.0-intel.0
    Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) to v23.05
    Open vSwitch with DPDK to 3.11
    Traffic Analytics Development Kit (TADK) to 23.03
    OpenSSL to openssl-3.1.0
    Intel® Data Center GPU Flex Series driver to 20230519 release
    SR-IOV FEC Operator to 2.7
    Intel® Platform Telemetry Insights to 23.07 (with license)
- Kubespray* is provided via ansible-galaxy collection instead of git submodule

Updates/Changes made for the Reference System 23.02.1 minor release:
- Stack Validation:
    Test cases created for Anuket Reference Architecture Kubernetes Component Level Architecture specifications, to be used for Anuket Reference Conformance Kubernetes and Project Sylva Stack validation
    Test cases created for Device Plugins Single Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV) Data Plane Development Kit and Multus Container Network Interface
    Cloud Native Network Function (CNF) Validation:
    Test case to check CNF allocation of SR-IOV devices like virtual functions of network adapters or accelerators, to be used for Project Sylva CNF validation
- Added workaround for building the Intel® Ethernet Operator and SR-IOV FEC (Forward-Error Correction) Operator
- Resolved issue regarding the user-space CNI by disabling Vector Packet Processing (VPP)
- Removed dependency of Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT) on OpenSSL to allow independent deployment of Crypto libraries

New Hardware (Platforms/CPUs/GPUs/Accelerators):
- 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (XCC, MCC)
- 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor with Intel® vRAN Boost up to 32 cores
- Intel® FPGA SmartNIC WSN6050 Platform
- 12th Gen Intel® Core™ processors
- Intel Atom® x6000e series processors
- Intel® Infrastructure Processing Unit (Intel® IPU) ASIC E2000 card

Removed Support:
- Discontinued supporting Cloud Native Data Plane (CNDP)
- Discontinued supporting RHEL 9.0 as base OS
- Discontinued supporting RHEL 8.6 RT as base OS

Known Limitations/Restrictions:
- Intel® Data Center GPU Flex Series, CPU Control Plane Plugin for Kubernetes, Intel® Media SDK (only Docker runtime) are only supported on Ubuntu OS
- FlexRAN™ container support is limited to v22.07, Ubuntu 22.04 base OS, and only on 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors
- MinIO is supported only with CRI-O runtime
- Only in-tree Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT) and Intel® Ethernet Network Adapter E810 drivers supported on RHEL 9.2
- Intel® Ethernet Network Adapter E810 in-tree driver does not support VF function on RHEL 9.2, which impacts XRAN mode test in FlexRAN™ application
- Intel® QuickAssist Technology (Intel® QAT) is not supported on Rocky Linux 9.1 on 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors
- Intel® Data Streaming Accelerator (Intel® DSA) may not work on some older (earlier stepping) CPUs on RHEL 9.2
- UserSpace CNI with VPP is not supported
- Rancher only supported for containerd.
- CAdvisor not supported on CRI-O runtime