From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Andy Gospodarek <gospo@cumulusnetworks.com>
Subject: Re: Flows! Offload them.
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2015 08:49:46 -0500
Message-ID: <20150302134946.GB7971@gospo.home.greyhouse.net>
References: <20150226074214.GF2074@nanopsycho.orion>
 <20150226083758.GA15139@vergenet.net>
 <20150226091628.GA4059@nanopsycho.orion>
 <20150226133326.GC23050@casper.infradead.org>
 <54EF3A78.9020507@intel.com>
 <20150226201635.GA366@hmsreliant.think-freely.org>
 <20150226215255.GA15033@penelope.isobedori.kobe.vergenet.net>
 <20150227012239.GB8847@neilslaptop.think-freely.org>
 <CA+mtBx_E5D-ryU=etdKf+7bnYwqHKJbqDc22A5=ypWCL5Z_E1g@mail.gmail.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Cc: Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com>,
	Simon Horman <simon.horman@netronome.com>,
	John Fastabend <john.r.fastabend@intel.com>,
	Thomas Graf <tgraf@suug.ch>, Jiri Pirko <jiri@resnulli.us>,
	Linux Netdev List <netdev@vger.kernel.org>,
	David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>,
	Andy Gospodarek <andy@greyhouse.net>,
	Daniel Borkmann <dborkman@redhat.com>,
	Or Gerlitz <ogerlitz@mellanox.com>,
	Jesse Gross <jesse@nicira.com>, jpettit@nicira.com,
	Joe Stringer <joestringer@nicira.com>,
	Jamal Hadi Salim <jhs@mojatatu.com>,
	Scott Feldman <sfeldma@gmail.com>,
	Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@gmail.com>,
	Roopa Prabhu <roopa@cumulusnetworks.com>,
	John Linville <linville@tuxdriver.com>,
	Shrijeet Mukherjee <shrijeet@gmail.com>, bcrl@kvack.org
To: Tom Herbert <therbert@google.com>
Return-path: <netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org>
Received: from mail-qa0-f44.google.com ([209.85.216.44]:44235 "EHLO
	mail-qa0-f44.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org
	with ESMTP id S1751237AbbCBNtv (ORCPT
	<rfc822;netdev@vger.kernel.org>); Mon, 2 Mar 2015 08:49:51 -0500
Received: by mail-qa0-f44.google.com with SMTP id n8so22744161qaq.3
        for <netdev@vger.kernel.org>; Mon, 02 Mar 2015 05:49:50 -0800 (PST)
Content-Disposition: inline
In-Reply-To: <CA+mtBx_E5D-ryU=etdKf+7bnYwqHKJbqDc22A5=ypWCL5Z_E1g@mail.gmail.com>
Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org
List-ID: <netdev.vger.kernel.org>

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.