Network Service Headers (NSH) is a fundamental encapsulation technology needed for SFC to efficiently forward packets through service chains. We have been working with the OVS community for quite some time to get NSH implemented in OVS. Meanwhile, we have had to use a branched, unofficial version of OVS. The OVS community finally completely implemented NSH in their 2.9 release. In the fluorine release, ODL was updated to use the latest OVS 2.9 NSH APIs, thus making ODL SFC dependent only on official versions of upstream dependencies. This is a major milestone for SFC, and should greatly help with ODL SFC's adoption.

Work was started in the ODL oxygen release to rework the ODL SFC Northbound APIs with respect to chain creation (specifically Rendered Service Paths (RSPs)). This work was completed in the Fluorine release, allowing SFC to completely take advantage of the MD-SAL configuration/operational strategy.

The SFC CSIT tests were reworked to greatly improve stability and quality.