[ovs-discuss] About the 'clone' action

[Ben Pfaff]

On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 04:28:53PM +0800, Hui Xiang wrote:
> I am trying to understand clone action deeply and checking the patch
> related with 'clone'[1], where said "The clone action provides an action
> envelope to enclose an action list." and "The clone action is very similar
> with the OpenFlow clone action recently added", but sorry I am not able to
> find any "clone" action definition in the OpenFlow spec[2], or any envelope
> 's kind of phrases, it just referred some clone(copy) of piple, am I
> looking in a wrong place?

Open vSwitch has two kinds of actions.  First, there are OpenFlow
actions, which include both standard actions and extension actions.
"clone" is an OpenFlow extension action implemented by Open vSwitch.
Second, there are datapath actions, which are an implementation detail
of Open vSwitch.  Open vSwitch has a datapath action also called
"clone", which does something similar to the OpenFlow extension "clone"
action but at the datapath level.