[ovs-dev] Plan to integrate Hyper-V support - NetLink support

[Alessandro Pilotti]

Hi Eitan,

On 25 Jul 2014, at 19:19, Eitan Eliahu <eliahue at vmware.com> wrote:

> 
> Hi Alessandro,
> I had some initial  thoughts about jumpstarting the integration. Obviously, we need to sort out the user/kernel mode interface before we could have a working solution to start with.
> I would like to suggest that Cloudbase would address the user mode code including Ben's comments on the error prone implementation while VMWare team would work of integrating the kernel portion of Netlink to VMWare existing driver. 

Considering that we already have a Netlink implementation (userspace and
kernel) which is a complete rewrite over the original one that you saw (more
robust and scalable), my suggestion is to split the work with something like:

* VMWare submits the initial driver support with NdisAllocateFragmentNetBufferList
support etc.
This should be the initial skeleton limited in scope to allow proper review
(e.g. no VXLAN / GRE encapsulation, no flows management, no userspace
communication etc).
The design must already include the base for supporting multiple vswitches and
datapaths.

* Cloudbase continues submitting patches with the userspace Netlink replacement
(that Ben is already reviewing)

* Cloudbase submits the kernel side Netlink channel

* VMWare submits the flow management implementation

* VMWare submits VXLAN support

* Cloudbase submits GRE support

* Next: GENEVE?

* Next: continuous integration?

This is just a proposal to start a discussion of course.

I’ll follow with the patches containing our recent implementation of the OVS
driver with Netlink support that can be used as basis for further reviews
and contributions.

> Once we have an end to end working solution (e.g. connectivity over a tunnel) we could have much more flexible development plan.
> Is this something you would consider? We can discuss the  details during our first meeting.

Sure! My nick on IRC (freenode) is alexpilotti. I'm also on #openvswitch.

Thanks,

Alessandro

> Thanks,
> Eitan
>