[ovs-discuss] Vlan transparency in OVN

[Slawek Kaplonski]

Hi,

I work in OpenStack Neutron mostly. We have there extension called
"vlan_transparent". See [1] for details.
Basically it allows to send traffic with vlan tags directly to the VMs.

Recently I was testing if that extension will work with OVN backend used in
Neutron. And it seems that we have work to do to make it working.
>From my test I found out that for each port I had rule like:

    cookie=0x0, duration=17.580s, table=8, n_packets=6, n_bytes=444, idle_age=2, priority=100,metadata=0x2,vlan_tci=0x1000/0x1000 actions=drop

which was dropping those tagged packets. After removal of this rule traffic was
fine.
So we need to have some way to tell northd that it shouldn't match on vlan_tci
at all in case when neutron network has got vlan_transparency set to True.

>From the discussion with Daniel Alvarez he told me that somehow we can try to
leverage such columns to request transparency (for example: parent_name=none
and tag_request=0). With this, northd can enforce transparency per port.

Another option could be to create an option in the “other_config” column in the
logical switch to have the setting per Neutron network
(other_config:vlan_transparent) While this seems more natural, it may break the
trunk/subport current feature.

What do You, as ovn developers thinks about that?
Is that maybe possible somehow to do currently in northd? Or is one of the
options given above doable and acceptable for You?

[1] https://specs.openstack.org/openstack/neutron-specs/specs/kilo/nfv-vlan-trunks.html

-- 
Slawek Kaplonski
Senior software engineer
Red Hat