Re: [RFC net-next 0/5] Add ETS and TBF Qdisc offload for Airoha EN7581 SoC

[Vladimir Oltean <olteanv@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Dec 12, 2024 at 06:03:08PM +0100, Lorenzo Bianconi wrote:
> > Explain "the mac chip forwards (in hw) the WAN traffic to the DSA switch
> > via the CPU port". How many packets does airoha_dev_select_queue() see?
> > All of them, or only the first of a flow? What operations does the
> > offload consist of?
> 
> I am referring to the netfilter flowtable offload where the kernel receives
> just the 3-way handshake of a TCP connection and then the traffic is fully
> offloaded (the hw receives a flower rule to route the traffic between
> interfaces applying NAT mangling if requested).

And how do the follow-up packets know to go to the same conduit queue as
the initial packets of the flow?

As mentioned, my trouble with your current proposal is that I don't
think it reacts adequately to the user space request. Given your command,
packets forwarded from lan1 to lan0 should also go through lan0's ETS
scheduler, but my understanding is that they won't, because they bypass
the conduit. I don't encourage adding new net_device_ops infrastructure
to implement unexpected behavior.

I'm trying to look at the big picture and abstract away the flowtable a
bit. I don't think the tc rule should be on the user port. Can the
redirection of packets destined towards a particular switch port be
accomplished with a tc u32 filter on the conduit interface instead?
If the tc primitives for either the filter or the action don't exist,
maybe those could be added instead? Like DSA keys in "flower" which gain
introspection into the encapsulated packet headers?

> Re-thinking about it, I guess it is better to post flowtable support
> first and then continue the discussion about QoS offloading, what do
> you think?

I don't know about Andrew, but I'm really not familiar with the
netfilter flowtable (and there's another series from Eric Woudstra
waiting for me to know everything about it).

Though, I don't think this can continue for long, we need to find a
common starting place for discussions, since the development for chips
with flowtable offload is starting to put pressure on DSA. What to read
as a starting point for a basic understanding?