Re: Flows! Offload them.

Andy Gospodarek
2015-03-02T13:49:51Z

On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 05:52:16PM -0800, Tom Herbert wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 5:22 PM, Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com> wrote:
[...]
> > Yes, exactly that, for the general traditional networking use case, that is
> > exactly what we want, to opportunistically move traffic faster with less load on
> > the cpu. We don't nominally care what traffic is offloaded, as long as the
> > hardware does a better job than just software alone. If we get an occasional
> > miss and have to do stuff in software, so be it.
> >
> +1 on an in kernel "Network Resource Manager". This also came up in
> Sunil's plan to configure RPS affinities from a driver so I'm taking
> liberty by generalizing the concept :-).

I agree completely that there is a need for what you both describe. Not
only to handle what items to offload for users looking for that level
of granularity, but also to allow driver implementers to decide if their
hardware/driver implementation may allow for async write of data to
hardware tables, and any other implementation specific detail they may
want to provide.