[ovs-dev] [PATCH net-next] openvswitch: add TTL decrement action

[Ben Pfaff]

On Tue, Nov 12, 2019 at 04:46:12PM +0100, Matteo Croce wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 12, 2019 at 4:00 PM Simon Horman <simon.horman at netronome.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 12, 2019 at 11:25:18AM +0100, Matteo Croce wrote:
> > > New action to decrement TTL instead of setting it to a fixed value.
> > > This action will decrement the TTL and, in case of expired TTL, send the
> > > packet to userspace via output_userspace() to take care of it.
> > >
> > > Supports both IPv4 and IPv6 via the ttl and hop_limit fields, respectively.
> > >
> >
> > Usually OVS achieves this behaviour by matching on the TTL and
> > setting it to the desired value, pre-calculated as TTL -1.
> > With that in mind could you explain the motivation for this
> > change?
> >
> 
> Hi,
> 
> the problem is that OVS creates a flow for each ttl it see. I can let
> vswitchd create 255 flows with like this:
> 
> $ for i in {2..255}; do ping 192.168.0.2 -t $i -c1 -w1 &>/dev/null & done
> $ ovs-dpctl dump-flows |fgrep -c 'set(ipv4(ttl'
> 255

Sure, you can easily invent a situation.  In real traffic there's not
usually such a variety of TTLs for a flow that matches on the number of
fields that OVS usually needs to match.  Do you see a real problem given
actual traffic in practice?