[ovs-dev] [patch net-next RFC 10/12] openvswitch: add support for datapath hardware offload

Thomas Graf tgraf at suug.ch
Tue Aug 26 14:20:27 UTC 2014


On 08/26/14 at 10:00am, Jamal Hadi Salim wrote:
> >I would argue that swflow is a superset of a Netlink route. It
> >may infact be very useful to extend the API with something that
> >understands the Netlink representation of a route and have the
> >API translate that to a classifier that can be offloaded.
> >
> 
> Sorry Thomas, I disagree.
> A route has a lot more knobs than just a simple flow representation.
> We are talking next hops (of which there could be multiple) etc.
> There is no way you can boil that down to a simple flow representation.

I guess we could argue forever.

To answer your specific statement. If per (wildcard) flow nexthop
balancing behaviour is good enough, the current flow insert is likely
sufficient. If the hardware should do the balancing, an additional
API function is probably needed to cleanly represent that.



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