[ovs-dev] [PATCH v5 13/13] datapath: Relax match_validate.

[Jarno Rajahalme]

On Sep 22, 2014, at 2:26 PM, Jesse Gross <jesse at nicira.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 4:05 PM, Jarno Rajahalme <jrajahalme at nicira.com> wrote:
>> When userspace inserts masked flows, it is not necessary to demand
>> that flows matching in a known ethertype also must have the
>> corresponding key, as a missing key will be automatically wildcarded.
>> 
>> For example, if a drop flow dropping all UDP packets is installed,
>> this patch allows the userspace application to not specify the
>> OVS_KEY_ATTR_UDP key.
>> 
>> Signed-off-by: Jarno Rajahalme <jrajahalme at nicira.com>
> 
> I guess I'm not sure that I quite understand the rationale for this
> patch or at least how it is planned to be used.
> 
> Since this is the reflection of the original flow that was hit, it
> should always be possible to fully specify the key. This doesn't
> affect the ability to mask out those fields so this change shouldn't
> save on flow setups or anything like that. I think the only new case
> that this enables is proactively installing flows. Is that the goal?

Even though we might not do proactive flow setups now, we should not make it harder than it needs to be. I came up with this trying to test simple datapath flows with ovs-dpctl.

  Jarno