[ovs-discuss] Use of multiple tables in OVS 1.11

Finucane, Stephen stephen.finucane at intel.com
Thu Sep 12 13:54:52 UTC 2013


Hi all,

I'm investigating the use of multiple tables in the latest release of Open vSwitch (OVS) and I'm having some difficulties. I would appreciate some help with the matter. The list is long unfortunately but I'd like to get on top of this if possible.


1.       I understand that OVS 1.11 provides two ways to forward packets from one table to another: the resubmit action and the goto_table instruction. As the resubmit action is a Nicera extension to OpenFlow should the goto_table instruction now be used in place of the resubmit action (i.e. resubmit may be depreciated in time)?


2.       With regard to flow syntax the following piece from the "Flow Syntax "section of the ofctl man page has confused me:

table=number
...
When this field is specified in add-flow, add-flows, mod-flows and del-flows commands, it activates a Nicira extension to OpenFlow, which as of this writing is only known to be implemented by Open vSwitch.

Does this mean we are not actually dealing with "OpenFlow Tables"? If not, what is the difference as they appear to be quite similar?


3.       It is my understanding that ofproto implements a flow table that supports wildcards, while the datapath's flow table support exact match only. If this is the case how are the matches spread across multiple tables in ofproto converted to a single dpif-compatible table. Is ofproto, as I suspect, merely an abstraction and the multiple tables get flattened into one table or does dpif actually support multiple tables? I've investigated dpif-provider.c without success.

I would appreciate any help I can get,

Cheers,
Stephen
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