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Message-ID: <467B1311.6090001@trash.net>
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2007 02:08:49 +0200
From: Patrick McHardy <kaber@...sh.net>
To: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@...ssion.com>
CC: netdev@...r.kernel.org, shemminger@...ux-foundation.org,
davem@...emloft.net, jeff@...zik.org
Subject: Re: [RFC NET 00/02]: Secondary unicast address support
Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Patrick McHardy <kaber@...sh.net> writes:
>
>
>> Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>>
>>> I'm trying to understand what the point of this patch is.
>>>
>>> In once sense I find the concept of filtering and listening for multiple
>>> mac addresses very interesting, especially if we could break out different
>>> streams of traffic by destination mac address into separate network devices.
>>> This would remove the need to any kind of ethernet tunnel and makes multiple
>>> network namespaces much more pleasant.
>>>
>>> However this just seems to allow a card to decode multiple mac addresses
>>> which in some oddball load balancing configurations may actually be
>>> useful, but it seems fairly limited.
>>>
>>> Do you have a specific use case you envision for this multiple mac
>>> functionality?
>>>
>>>
>> Yes, please see the MACVLAN patch I posted one or two days earlier.
>>
>
> Thanks. That is what I was envisioning. I keep suspecting one of
> the cool multi-rx queue nics my start doing some of the demux in hardware.
> But whatever if it works and is relatively fast it is good enough for me.
>
When NICs support that I guess they the macvlan driver could be adapted
to take advantage of that.
>
>> 8021q can also make use of it and Dave mentioned some virtualization
>> devices want this as well.
>>
>
> Right makes sense. And ethernet bridging (which is the general case
> of the virtualization Dave mentioned should also be able to take
> advantage of multiple unicast addresses). So this definitely make
> sense.
>
It needs promiscous mode to learn, so I'm not sure how much
this will help bridging.
> Have you done any performance testing with the macvlan code? With
> the ethernet tunnel device we keep getting copied unicast packets on
> some path or other which slowed things down. Simply not doing the
> firewalling until the packets have made it through the macvlan device
> should help here.
>
Performance should be at least as good as on a bridge device since
the macvlan driver does basically nothing and uses the same functions
for receiving and sending packets.
> For the macvlan code do we need to do anything special if we transmit
> to a mac we would normally receive? Another unicast mac of the same
> nic for example.
That doesn't happen under normal circumstances. I don't believe
it would work.
> For the macvlan hash you just use an upper byte. Is that just a
> simple starting place, or do we not need a more complex hash.
>
It comes from the original code, I think it should be good enough.
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