[ovs-discuss] Porting OVS 1.10 to a hardware switch

[Harsha Kovuru]

Hi,

The switch I am working on has a hardware switch connected to the host CPU
via PCI interface. The host CPU is running Linux and has a ethernet
interface "eth0" for connecting to the openflow controller. I compiled OVS
without the kernel support and with the default ofproto-dpif and netdev
providers. I ran it on the switch and I am able to connect to the
controller using these commands:
1.ovsdb-tool --verbose --log-file create
2. ovsdb-server --remote=punix:/var/openvswitch/run/db.sock \
             --remote=db:Open_vSwitch,manager_options \
             --pidfile --detach --verbose --log-file
3. ovs-vsctl --no-wait --verbose --log-file init
4. ovs-vswitchd --pidfile --detach --verbose --log-file
5. ovs-vsctl --verbose --log-file add-br br0
6. ovs-vsctl --verbose --log-file set bridge br0 datapath_type=netdev
7. ovs-vsctl --verbose --log-file add-port br0 eth0
8. ovs-vsctl --verbose --log-file set-controller br0 tcp:10.3.0.107:6633

If I implement my own ofproto provider and netdev provider to manage the
hardware switch ports with the controller, how can I connect to the
openflow controller?
Do I need to implement two datapaths, one for hardware switch ports and one
for "eth0"?
I am basically trying to understand how OVS connects to the openflow
controller.

Thanks,
Harsha


On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 11:59 AM, Harsha Kovuru
<harsha.kovuru at cyaninc.com>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am trying to port OVS to a hardware switch. I read the INSTALL* and
> PORTING documents and I going through the code to understand the current
> implementation. I understand that I would have to implement a ofproto
> provider and a netdev provider. I compiled OVS without the kernel support
> and I ran it on the switch and I am able to connect to the controller.
>
> The ofproto-dpif implementation supports two datapath types "netdev" and
> "system". Why are they used?
> The netdev provider initializes three types of devices "system",
> "internal" and "tap". Why are they used?
> Is one of them used for the openflow controller connection?
>
> Thanks,
> Harsha
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