[ovs-dev] [PATCH v2 3/3] datapath: add layer 3 flow/port support

[Ben Pfaff]

On Fri, May 09, 2014 at 02:48:47PM -0700, Jesse Gross wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 2:55 AM, Lori Jakab <lojakab at cisco.com> wrote:
> > Ben was involved in EXT-112 at the ONF, which has the objective to "Support
> > non-Ethernet packets throughout the pipeline".  The current version of the
> > proposal, recently moved from incubation to prototyping, defines a new
> > "packet type" match field, which is used to determine the type of the first
> > header.  There are 5 namespaces that can be used to define the packet type,
> > one of which is EtherType.  With this match type, the canonical
> > representation for an IPv4 packet would be (namespace=1,ns_type=0x800),
> > namespace 1 being the EtherType.
> 
> Actually, that's pretty much what I'm trying to avoid :) I don't
> really like that we have to introduce a new namespace for EtherType
> and then yet another new namespace for the type of the type.

Yeah, I don't like the current EXT-112 proposal either.  I'm not really
planning to fight it, though, because it doesn't really make OpenFlow
worse (really, that would be difficult).

The important thing is to get the Netlink protocol right.  We'll
probably have to overlay nasty OpenFlow crap on top of it, but I'm OK
with that; like I said, it can't get much worse.