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Message-ID: <4F4FF578.30000@intel.com>
Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:17:28 -0800
From: John Fastabend <john.r.fastabend@...el.com>
To: Jamal Hadi Salim <jhs@...atatu.com>
CC: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@...tta.com>,
bhutchings@...arflare.com, roprabhu@...co.com,
netdev@...r.kernel.org, mst@...hat.com, chrisw@...hat.com,
davem@...emloft.net, gregory.v.rose@...el.com, kvm@...r.kernel.org,
sri@...ibm.com, kernel@...tstofly.org
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v0 1/2] net: bridge: propagate FDB table into hardware
On 3/1/2012 5:36 AM, Jamal Hadi Salim wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-02-29 at 10:19 -0800, John Fastabend wrote:
>
>>>
>>> I want to see a unified API so that user space control applications (RSTP, TRILL?)
>>> can use one set of netlink calls for both software bridge and hardware offloaded
>>> bridges. Does this proposal meet that requirement?
>>>
>
> I dont see any issues with those requirements being met.
>
>> Jamal, so why do "They have to be different calls"? I'm not so sure anymore...
>> moving to RTM_FDB_XXXENTRY saved some refactoring in the bridge module but that
>> is just cosmetic.
>
> I may not want to use the s/ware bridge i.e I may want to use h/ware
> bridge. I may want to use both. So there are 3 variations there. You
> need at least 1.5 bits to represent them if you are going to use the
> same interface. There may be features in either h/ware but not in
> s/ware and vice-versa.
> A single interface with flags which say this applies to hware:sware:both
> would be good, but it may be harder to achieve - thats why i suggested
> they be different.
>
> cheers,
> jamal
>
Hmm so I think what I'll do is this...
both: ndm_flags = 0
sw : ndm_flags = NTF_SW_FDB
hw : ndm_flags = NTF_HW_FDB
Then current tools will work with embedded bridges and software bridges
with the interesting case being when a port supporting an offloaded FDB
is attached to a SW bridge. Doing both in this case seems to be a reasonable
default to me.
The tricky bit will be pulling the message handlers out of the ./net/bridge
code so that we don't have to always load the bridge module to add entries
to a macvlan for example. I need to look at a few other things today but
I'll code up a patch for this tomorrow.
.John
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