netdev - Re: [PATCH net-next 0/2] 802.1ad S-VLAN support

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Date:	Mon, 7 Nov 2011 21:35:49 +0000
From:	Ben Hutchings <bhutchings@...arflare.com>
To:	David Lamparter <equinox@...c24.net>
CC:	netdev <netdev@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next 0/2] 802.1ad S-VLAN support

On Mon, 2011-11-07 at 16:48 +0100, David Lamparter wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 07, 2011 at 03:11:44PM +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> > On Sat, 2011-11-05 at 17:54 +0100, David Lamparter wrote:
> > > this kernel patch, together with the iproute2 userspace support,
> > > allows creating 802.1ad S-VLAN devices.
> [...]
> > We definitely need to think about how MTU/MRU are configured when
> > multiple VLAN tags are used, though I don't think it's essential to do
> > before this goes in.  To be slightly more blunt than your documentation,
> > our current handling of MTU/MRU and VLANs is a botch.
> 
> I fully agree, both on the botch and on fixing it separately.
> 
> > Do you have any plan to improve that?
> 
> Yes, what i'd like to do is introduce a new field into struct netdevice
> that tracks the hardware Max Frame Size; it'd be a read-only field
> that's initialized once by the driver. (The field would only be used by
> ethernet-like devices.) To get things started easier, the field can have
> a default value like 0xffff, so if the driver doesn't set it we end up
> with the same old nothing-checked behaviour.
>
> MTU change requests from userspace are then validated against the MFS
> field for ethernet devices.
> 
> Each VLAN device created will inherit its parent's value minus 4 (minus
> 16 for 802.1ah Mac-in-Mac, I'm working on that currently).
> 
> A nice side-effect would be that we can export this value in sysfs so
> the admin easily can see the hardware limitations. No more trial & error
> to find that r8169 (or was it forcedeth?) has the totally weird value of
> 7200... ("almost-jumbo-frames-but-not-quite")

The driver for a physical device may still need to know the overall
MTU/MRU.  Certainly in case of hardware/drivers which do not support DMA
scatter we do not want the driver to allocate oversized buffers.  Also
some devices may partition internal FIFOs according to the MTU/MRU and
we should nto unnecessarily reduce the maximum number of packets that
can fit in those FIFOs.

So I think that instead of propagating MFS down, we should propagate MTU
change requests up, but maintaining a distinction between the MTUs for
untagged and tagged (with different types) packets..

> Anyway, I'm still in the "design" phase with regards to two points:
> 
>  - bridge - is the MFS field allowed to change when we add/remove
>    devices? Is there a notification e.g. for VLANs on top of the bridge?
> 
>  - "speshul" hardware. I think I saw chips that support "1514 bytes" and
>    "1514 bytes + 1 vlan tag" but not "1518 bytes". If this is indeed a
>    case we want to support (no idea if it is), we could add a separate
>    "extra_vlans" field that is 1 for those devices. (It would only be
>    used for protocol-0x8100 802.1Q vlans).
> 
> > Or to allow use of offload features for multiple-tagged packets?
> 
> Hm. Well... I have yet to do quite a bit of reading to understand all of
> the offload mechanisms. What the 802.1Q code currently does is
> 
> 	dev->hw_features = NETIF_F_ALL_CSUM | NETIF_F_SG |
> 			   NETIF_F_FRAGLIST | NETIF_F_ALL_TSO |
> 			   NETIF_F_HIGHDMA | NETIF_F_SCTP_CSUM |
> 			   NETIF_F_ALL_FCOE;

Those are the features that can *potentially* be toggled.

> which is pretty much the "basic" set. I don't see why any of that should
> differ for 802.1ad (or even 802.1ah), but my understanding is barely
> enough to tell that these flags should work for 802.1ad.

See vlan_dev_fix_features() and note that vlan_features is zero for a
VLAN device.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings, Staff Engineer, Solarflare
Not speaking for my employer; that's the marketing department's job.
They asked us to note that Solarflare product names are trademarked.

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