[ovs-dev] [PATCH net] gso: do GSO for local skb with size bigger than MTU

[Michael S. Tsirkin]

On Tue, Dec 02, 2014 at 10:12:04AM -0800, Jesse Gross wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 2, 2014 at 9:41 AM, Thomas Graf <tgraf at suug.ch> wrote:
> > On 12/02/14 at 07:34pm, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> >> On Tue, Dec 02, 2014 at 05:09:27PM +0000, Thomas Graf wrote:
> >> > On 12/02/14 at 01:48pm, Flavio Leitner wrote:
> >> > > What about containers or any other virtualization environment that
> >> > > doesn't use Virtio?
> >> >
> >> > The host can dictate the MTU in that case for both veth or OVS
> >> > internal which would be primary container plumbing techniques.
> >>
> >> It typically can't do this easily for VMs with emulated devices:
> >> real ethernet uses a fixed MTU.
> >>
> >> IMHO it's confusing to suggest MTU as a fix for this bug, it's
> >> an unrelated optimization.
> >> ICMP_DEST_UNREACH/ICMP_FRAG_NEEDED is the right fix here.
> >
> > PMTU discovery only resolves the issue if an actual IP stack is
> > running inside the VM. This may not be the case at all.
> 
> It's also only really a correct thing to do if the ICMP packet is
> coming from an L3 node. If you are doing straight bridging then you
> have to resort to hacks like OVS had before, which I agree are not
> particularly desirable.

The issue seems to be that fundamentally, this is
bridging interfaces with variable MTUs (even if MTU values
on devices don't let us figure this out)-
that is already not straight bridging, and
I would argue sending ICMPs back is the right thing to do.


> > I agree that exposing an MTU towards the guest is not applicable
> > in all situations, in particular because it is difficult to decide
> > what MTU to expose. It is a relatively elegant solution in a lot
> > of virtualization host cases hooked up to an orchestration system
> > though.
> 
> I also think this is the right thing to do as a common case
> optimization and I know other platforms (such as Hyper-V) do it. It's
> not a complete solution so we still need the original patch in this
> thread to handle things transparently.

Well, as I believe David (and independently Jason) is saying, it looks like
the ICMPs we are sending back after applying the original patch have the
wrong MTU.

And if I understand what David is saying here, IP is also the wrong place to
do it.

-- 
MST