[ovs-discuss] Open vSwitch 1.1.1 Available

[Ben Pfaff]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 08:03:38AM -0700, Peter Phaal wrote:
> The porting guide shows an "ofproto provider" block in the first diagram, which I take to be the ofproto plugin? This block is dropped in the second diagram. 

The block labeled ofproto-dpif in the second diagram is an example of
an ofproto provider; that is, "ofproto provider" is the interface and
"ofproto-dpif" is one implementation of it.

(Is there a good way to illustrate that in the diagrams?  I can see
why it is confusing, but I don't yet see how to improve it.)

> The vSwitch case is likely to see the most hardware diversity since
> different vendor's network adapters might be installed in the same
> server. Some adapters may have suitable hardware support for
> OpenFlow and others won't. Making it clear what the driver boundary
> is for the adapter makes it easier to see how they would all plug
> into OVS as a common control plane. It looks like the ofproto
> provider API abstracts the hardware differences in the forwarding
> capabilities. Is this correct?

That's the intention, yes.