Re: [PATCH 2/4] RDMA/core: Resolve MAC of next-hop device without ARP support

Parav Pandit
2025-09-15T17:16:26Z

On 15-09-2025 09:30 am, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 10, 2025 at 10:55:36AM +0000, Parav Pandit wrote:
>>>> This leads to incorrect behavior and may result in packet transmission
>>> failures.
>>>> Fix this by deferring MAC resolution to the IP stack via neighbour
>>>> lookup, allowing proper resolution or error reporting as appropriate.
>>> What is the difference here? For IPv4, neighbour lookup is ARP, no?
>> It is but it is not the only way. A device may not do ARP by itself but it relies on the rest of the stack like vrf or ip vlan mode to resolve.
>> A user may also set manual entry without explicit ARP.
> I think it was just a mistake to use NOARP this way in RDMA, I looked
> in the git history and there was no justification. That or it was
> right in the 2.x days and netdev moved on to the current schem.
>
> I expect to just call the neighbor functions and if they can't work
> for some reason they should fail?
>
> Jason

Right. This is the patch does, to rely on the neighbour functions to
resolve without depending on the NOARP.