RE: Flows! Offload them.

Arad, Ronen
2015-03-01T09:47:59Z

>-----Original Message-----
>From: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org [mailto:netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org] On
>Behalf Of Thomas Graf
>Sent: Friday, February 27, 2015 12:42 AM
>To: Neil Horman
>Cc: Simon Horman; Fastabend, John R; Jiri Pirko; netdev@vger.kernel.org;
>davem@davemloft.net; andy@greyhouse.net; dborkman@redhat.com;
>ogerlitz@mellanox.com; jesse@nicira.com; jpettit@nicira.com;
>joestringer@nicira.com; jhs@mojatatu.com; sfeldma@gmail.com;
>f.fainelli@gmail.com; roopa@cumulusnetworks.com; linville@tuxdriver.com;
>shrijeet@gmail.com; gospo@cumulusnetworks.com; bcrl@kvack.org
>Subject: Re: Flows! Offload them.
>
>
>Maybe I'm misunderstanding your statement here but I think it's essential
>that the kernel is able to handle whatever we program in hardware even
>if the hardware tables look differrent than the software tables, no matter
>whether the configuration occurs through OVS or not. A punt to software
>should always work even if it does not happen. So while I believe that
>OVS needs more control over the hardware than available through the
>datapath cache it must program both the hardware and software in parallel
>even though the building blocks for doing so might look different.
>

I believe that having an equivalent punt path should be optional and
controlled by application policy. Some applications might give up on punt
path due to its throughput implication and prefer to just drop in HW and
possibly leak some packets to software for exception processing and logging
only.

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