Re: Flows! Offload them.

Jiri Pirko
2015-02-28T21:31:37Z

Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 09:02:33PM CET, davem@davemloft.net wrote:
>From: Tom Herbert <therbert@google.com>
>Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2015 10:15:24 -0800
>
>> But, routing (aka switching) in the stack is not configured through
>> TC. We have a whole forwarding and routing infrastructure (eg.
>> iproute) with optimizations that allow routes to be cached in
>> sockets, etc. To me, it seems like offloading that basic functionality
>> is a prerequisite before attempting to offload more advanced policy
>> mechanisms of TC, netfilter, etc.
>
>+1
>
>I think this is the most important post in this entire thread.
>
>The current proposal here is jumping the gun by several weeks if
>not months.
>
>We have no idea what roadblocks or design barriers we will hit
>with just plain L2 and L3 forwarding yet.
>
>Therefore it is premature to move over to making major decisions
>about flow offloading before we've made more progress with the
>more fundamental (and in my opinion much more important) offload
>facilities.

Fair enough. I just felt that the flows are happening just now
(John's work) so I wanted people to stay in focus. But I completely
agree that plain L2, L3 forwarding should be handled first. Then some
of the quirks connected with that, flows and other stuff after.

>
>Jiri, if you want to implement an example set of classifiers in
>software that can completely replace openvswitch's datapath, that's
>fine. And it's a completely independant task to designing how we'll
>offload flows to hardware in the future.

Nod. Will do that.