[ovs-dev] Datapath Merge Revisited

Simon Horman horms at verge.net.au
Tue Nov 2 22:27:06 UTC 2010


On Tue, Nov 02, 2010 at 01:39:44PM -0700, Jesse Gross wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 2, 2010 at 5:41 AM, Simon Horman <horms at verge.net.au> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > are there any outstanding issues in the datapath that
> > would prevent me from preparing some patches against
> > (pre 2.6.38) net-next-2.6 once it opens and submitting
> > them here and to netdev for review?
> 
> Unfortunately some of the Netlink changes got bogged down aren't in
> yet due to time constraints.  Beyond that and the 2.6.37 related
> things that I mentioned in the other message, there is one additional
> thing that has come up.

Ok, understood. I haven't been following things as closely
as I should and I'd missed netlink being bogged down.

> A few months ago, another project tried to merge upstream and Dave
> Miller commented[1] on their implementation of a hash table library.
> There's something fairly similar in the Open vSwitch datapath.  In
> addition to his (valid) concerns, the current OVS flow table is a
> source of bugs that are difficult to eliminate as is.  This is because
> deleting an entry requires allocating memory to enable RCU and those
> allocations can potentially fail.  While deletions can return an error
> code, it's often not clear what the caller should do with it and we
> can end up in a inconsistent state.
> 
> It would be really nice if we can address this problem now.  We'll
> almost certainly need to deal with it before the merge.
> 
> [1] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.network/172955

Understood.





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