[ovs-discuss] Strange behavior with paths longer than 5 hops.

[Jesse Gross]

On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 7:32 PM, Vjekoslav Brajkovic
<balkan at cs.washington.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I ran into this problem and I think it might be a bug. The problem is
> most likely somewhere on the datapath, as it appears to be happening
> with and without a controller.  Here are the steps to reproduce it.
>
> (container 0) <--> sw0 <--> sw1 <--> sw2 <--> sw3 <--> sw4 <--> sw5
> <--> sw6 <--> sw7 <--> (container 1)
>
> It appears to be happening with paths that are above 5 hops. Both with
> OVS 1.4.2 and 1.6.1.

It's not a bug, it's intentional behavior.  In order to avoid blowing
out the kernel stack in the event of a loop or excessive number of
hops we limit the number of times a packet can traverse the datapath
to 5.