[PATCH RFC (resend) net-next 0/6] virtio-net: Add support for virtio-net header extensions

[Vladislav Yasevich <vyasevich@gmail.com>]

Curreclty virtion net header is fixed size and adding things to it is rather
difficult to do.  This series attempt to add the infrastructure as well as some
extensions that try to resolve some deficiencies we currently have.

First, vnet header only has space for 16 flags.  This may not be enough
in the future.  The extensions will provide space for 32 possbile extension
flags and 32 possible extensions.   These flags will be carried in the
first pseudo extension header, the presense of which will be determined by
the flag in the virtio net header.

The extensions themselves will immidiately follow the extension header itself.
They will be added to the packet in the same order as they appear in the
extension flags.  No padding is placed between the extensions and any
extensions negotiated, but not used need by a given packet will convert to
trailing padding.

For example:
 | vnet mrg hdr | ext hdr | ext 1 | ext 2 | ext 5 | .. pad .. | packet data |

Extensions proposed in this series are:
 - IPv6 fragment id extension
   * Currently, the guest generated fragment id is discarded and the host
     generates an IPv6 fragment id if the packet has to be fragmented.  The
     code attempts to add time based perturbation to id generation to make
     it harder to guess the next fragment id to be used.  However, doing this
     on the host may result is less perturbation (due to differnet timing)
     and might make id guessing easier.  Ideally, the ids generated by the
     guest should be used.  One could also argue that we a "violating" the
     IPv6 protocol in the if the _strict_ interpretation of the spec.

 - VLAN header acceleration
   * Currently virtio doesn't not do vlan header acceleration and instead
     uses software tagging.  One of the first things that the host will do is
     strip the vlan header out.  When passing the packet the a guest the
     vlan header is re-inserted in to the packet.  We can skip all that work
     if we can pass the vlan data in accelearted format.  Then the host will
     not do any extra work.  However, so far, this yeilded a very small
     perf bump (only ~1%).  I am still looking into this.

 - UDP tunnel offload
   * Similar to vlan acceleration, with this extension we can pass additional
     data to host for support GSO with udp tunnel and possible other
     encapsulations.  This yeilds a significant perfromance improvement
    (still testing remote checksum code).

An addition extension that is unfinished (due to still testing for any
side-effects) is checksum passthrough to support drivers that set
CHECKSUM_COMPLETE.  This would eliminate the need for guests to compute
the software checksum.

This series only takes care of virtio net.  I have addition patches for the
host side (vhost and tap/macvtap as well as qemu), but wanted to get feedback
on the general approach first.

Vladislav Yasevich (6):
  virtio-net: Remove the use the padded vnet_header structure
  virtio-net: make header length handling uniform
  virtio_net: Add basic skeleton for handling vnet header extensions.
  virtio-net: Add support for IPv6 fragment id vnet header extension.
  virtio-net: Add support for vlan acceleration vnet header extension.
  virtio-net: Add support for UDP tunnel offload and extension.

 drivers/net/virtio_net.c        | 132 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------
 include/linux/skbuff.h          |   5 ++
 include/linux/virtio_net.h      |  91 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
 include/uapi/linux/virtio_net.h |  38 ++++++++++++
 4 files changed, 242 insertions(+), 24 deletions(-)

-- 
2.7.4



Vladislav Yasevich (6):
  virtio-net: Remove the use the padded vnet_header structure
  virtio-net: make header length handling uniform
  virtio_net: Add basic skeleton for handling vnet header extensions.
  virtio-net: Add support for IPv6 fragment id vnet header extension.
  virtio-net: Add support for vlan acceleration vnet header extension.
  virtio: Add support for UDP tunnel offload and extension.

 drivers/net/virtio_net.c        | 121 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------
 include/linux/skbuff.h          |   5 ++
 include/linux/virtio_net.h      |  91 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
 include/uapi/linux/virtio_net.h |  38 +++++++++++++
 4 files changed, 236 insertions(+), 19 deletions(-)

-- 
2.7.4