Re: [PATCH net-next 0/2] netlink: specs: complete OVS family coverage

[Minxi Hou <houminxi@gmail.com>]

Hi Aaron, Ilya,

I sent the first two patches of the pyroute2-to-ynl migration series.
Before continuing with patch 3 (the actual ovs-dpctl.py migration),
I wanted to check if the design direction matches what you had in mind.

A few questions:

  1. ovs_packet.yaml marks key/actions/egress-tun-key as type: binary
     instead of nest, since ynl doesn't support cross-spec attribute
     references.  The plan is to load ovs_flow's YnlFamily separately
     to decode those blobs.  Does that seem reasonable, or would you
     prefer duplicating the attribute-sets (~600 lines) into
     ovs_packet.yaml for full typing?

  2. For upcall receiving, patch 2 adds ntf_listen() to pyynl so we
     can bind a socket and receive unicast MISS/ACTION upcalls through
     the existing poll_ntf path.  The alternative would be raw socket
     code in the selftest.  Any preference?

  3. The remaining pyroute2 usage in ovs-dpctl.py is pyroute2.iproute
     (tunnel interface creation) and NDB (interface lookup).  I'm
     planning to replace those with subprocess calls to `ip`.  Any
     concerns with that approach?

  4. For the ODP string parser (~1500 lines of flow key/action
     encoding), that stays as-is since it handles the human-readable
     input format.  Anything there you'd want changed?

Happy to adjust the design before writing patch 3.

Thanks,
Minxi