[ovs-discuss] Question on SRIOV + OpenvSwitch

[Nicholas Bastin]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 2:29 AM, Bhattiprolu RaviKumar <
ravikumar.bhattiprolu at gmail.com> wrote:

>   Thanks for the reply. I am more looking from virtualization perspective.
> If I have attached VFs to VMs and switching happens in NIC, OVS will not
> know what is happening in NIC. Also, the switching inside NIX is based on
> ethernet MAC address and VLAN. We will not be able to take the full
> advantage of other OVS features like VxLAN encapsulation etc at this moment
> with VFs.
>

You can't have mutually exclusive things.  VFs are built to bypass at least
one layer of software forwarding (and often multiple layers), and as such,
they do what they are designed for.  If you want to take advantage of
software features not built into the NIC, you should either not be using
VFs, or attaching those features to the end of the VF.


> Also, number of VFs will be limited and ifd we need to switch between VF
> and a software interface, it will not be possible. This is what I mean by
> support in OVS. Is there any specification whichcal tell HW requirements so
> that OVS can work in this situation seamlessly.
>

You can switch between a VF and a software interface using the rules in the
NIC (by slotting all software interfaces into a single VF in dom0, as is
typical).  I suspect however that you want to *override* a choice the NIC
makes, which you cannot do.  You should view the NIC as an upstream switch
in your topology, and if you want packets to come to your vswitch, you need
to configure the upstream switch appropriately.

--
Nick
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