[ovs-dev] [RFC PATCH] datapath: allow tunnels to be created with rtnetlink

[Jiri Benc]

On Thu, 8 Dec 2016 22:49:56 -0800, Pravin Shelar wrote:
> OVS out of tree kernel module is using compat tunnel code upto kernel
> 4.5 kernel even thought LWT is available in these kernels. This is due
> to missing features on these kernel which are backported to OVS
> module. In future we could bump up requirements of kernel again.
> Therefore I think we could add compat code for GPE given it is not
> that complicated.

What I'm concerned about is not so much the code in the out of tree
module but the added code that would have to try genetlink for
VXLAN-GPE. I hoped to use rtnetlink only for this; adding genetlink
would required quite a bit of code (also because it will have to be
tried only for the out of tree module but never for the in kernel one;
this differs from what we'll do for VXLAN itself).

We'd end up with three different handling for different features:

(1) genetlink+rtnetlink for both out of tree and in tree module (for
    e.g. plain VXLAN)
(2) genetlink+rtnetlink for out of tree module, rtnetlink for in three
    module (for VXLAN-GPE)
(3) rtnetlink for both out of tree and in tree module (new VXLAN
    features added in the future)

I hoped to avoid this. Especially given that (2) covers only very
limited time period.

But if you insist...

 Jiri