On Tue, Sep 02, 2014 at 06:55:14PM -0700, Jesse Gross wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 1:10 AM, Simon Horman <simon.hor...@netronome.com> 
> wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 10:12:49AM +0900, Simon Horman wrote:
> >> On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 03:03:53PM -0500, Jesse Gross wrote:
> >> > On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 11:51 AM, Ben Pfaff <b...@nicira.com> wrote:
> >> > > On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 10:26:14AM +0900, Simon Horman wrote:
> >> > >> On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 08:30:08AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> >> > >> > On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 09:19:41PM +0900, Simon Horman wrote:
> >> > >> What we would like to do is to provide something generally useful
> >> > >> which may be used as appropriate to:
> >> > >
> >> > > I'm going to skip past these ideas, which do sound interesting, because
> >> > > I think that they're more for Pravin and Jesse than for me.  I hope 
> >> > > that
> >> > > they will provide some reactions to them.
> >> >
> >> > For the hardware offloading piece in particular, I would take a look
> >> > at the discussion that has been going on in the netdev mailing list. I
> >> > think the general consensus (to the extent that there is one) is that
> >> > the hardware offload interface should be a block outside of OVS and
> >> > then OVS (mostly likely from userspace) configures it.
> >>
> >> Thanks, I am now digesting that conversation.
> >
> > A lively conversation indeed.
> >
> > We are left with two questions for you:
> >
> > 1. Would you look at a proposal (I have some rough code that even works)
> >    for a select group action in the datapath prior to the finalisation
> >    of the question of offloads infrastructure in the kernel?
> >
> >    From our point of view we would ultimately like to use such an action to
> >    offload to hardware. But it seems that there might be use-cases (not the
> >    one that I have rough code for) where such an action may be useful. For
> >    example to allow parts of IPVS to be used to provide stateful load
> >    balancing.
> >
> >    Put another: It doesn't seem that a select group action is dependent on
> >    an offloads tough there are cases where they could be used together.
> 
> I agree that this is orthogonal to offloading and seems fine to do
> now. It seems particularly nice if we can use IPVS in a clean way,
> similar to what is currently being worked on for connection tracking.
> 
> I guess I'm not entirely sure how you plan to offload this to hardware
> so it's hard to say how it would intersect in the future. However, the
> current plan is to have offloading be directed for a higher point
> (i.e. userspace) and have the OVS kernel module remain a software path
> so probably it doesn't really matter.
> 
> However, I'll Pravin comment since he'll be the one reviewing the code.

Thanks, I will respond to this separately as a response to Pravin's email.

> > 2. Would you consider an set of offload-hooks for Open vSwitch at this time?
> >
> >    These could be backed by loading a module that implements the relevant
> >    hooks. And in the longer term one such module (possibly to rule them
> >    all) could be implemented using the kernel offload API that has
> >    been the subject of recent lively discussion.
> 
> I'm not too excited about doing an interim offloading API for this,
> especially since I think the long term version is likely to be
> significantly different.

Thanks, that answers my question.
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