From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jamal Hadi Salim Subject: Re: [patch net-next RFC 0/4] introduce infrastructure for support of switch chip datapath Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 07:49:07 -0400 Message-ID: <532AD5B3.6020205@mojatatu.com> References: <1395243232-32630-1-git-send-email-jiri@resnulli.us> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: davem@davemloft.net, nhorman@tuxdriver.com, andy@greyhouse.net, tgraf@suug.ch, dborkman@redhat.com, ogerlitz@mellanox.com, jesse@nicira.com, pshelar@nicira.com, azhou@nicira.com, ben@decadent.org.uk, stephen@networkplumber.org, jeffrey.t.kirsher@intel.com, vyasevic@redhat.com, xiyou.wangcong@gmail.com, john.r.fastabend@intel.com, edumazet@google.com, Scott Feldman , Lennert Buytenhek To: Jiri Pirko , netdev@vger.kernel.org Return-path: Received: from mail-ig0-f169.google.com ([209.85.213.169]:40435 "EHLO mail-ig0-f169.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1757281AbaCTLtT (ORCPT ); Thu, 20 Mar 2014 07:49:19 -0400 Received: by mail-ig0-f169.google.com with SMTP id h18so16969416igc.0 for ; Thu, 20 Mar 2014 04:49:19 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: <1395243232-32630-1-git-send-email-jiri@resnulli.us> Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Hi Jiri, On 03/19/14 11:33, Jiri Pirko wrote: > This is just an early draft, RFC. I wanted to post this early to get the > feedback as soon as possible. > > The basic idea is to introduce a generic infractructure to support various > switch chips in kernel. Also the idea is to benefit of currently existing > Open vSwitch userspace infrastructure. > I think the abstraction should be a netdev and to be specific the bridge - not openvswitch. Our current tools like ifconfig, iproute2, bridge etc should continue to work. In my experience, it is sufficient to model a switch after the linux bridge at the basic level if the starting point is L2 (which is the lowest common denominator). And then you add capabilities that different chips expose. Not every chip can do vxlan, flows etc. And we already know how to abstract those out. My experience on top of broadcom chips is the approach i described works rather well. Additionally, note: We do have L2 devices that offload in the kernel (refer to DSA, posting earlier from the openwrt guys, and the intel devices which do VDMQ etc). I am now counting we have 5 different approaches if we add yours. cheers, jamal