Re: Support for VRF in NFS?

[Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>]

On 11/08/2018 07:31 AM, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 07, 2018 at 09:08:16PM -0800, Ben Greear wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 11/07/2018 05:14 PM, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
>>> On Tue, Nov 06, 2018 at 01:03:54PM -0800, Ben Greear wrote:
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> I made a stab at implementing VRF support in NFS, but it appears
>>>> fairly complicated and I ended up reverting my changes....
>>>>
>>>> Is anyone working on this?
>>>>
>>>> And, if not, if anyone would like to be sponsored to work on this, please
>>>> let me know.
>>>
>>> Um, sorry--what's VRF?
>>
>> Virtual Router logic.  It is sort of like network stack containers,
>> and has been solid and fully featured in the kernel since 4.16 or so.
>>
>> In the end, you effectively need to call the logic that SO_BINDTODEVICE
>> calls on the socket before binding to an IP.
>>
>> The NFS and RPC logic is a giant tangled mess to my eyes, so
>> hoping I could bribe someone else to do it :)
>
> So it's not enough to support network namespaces?
>
> What's your motivation for this?

Network namespaces are difficult to uses for lots of use cases, and thus VRF
was born.

My own motivation is that it allows me to make hundreds or thousands
of individual NFS mounts from local mac-vlan (or other virtual/physical interfaces),
for testing purposes.

Similar to my patch set that binds to local IP address, which gives similar feature
set for non-VRF configurations.  These bind-local-IP patches are not upstream and were rejected in
the past as un-wanted.  I'm hoping VRF support would be more acceptable.

Thanks,
Ben

-- 
Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com