We're doing some large-scale quality of service experiments on EC2 
using OVS.  Since we do not have access to the hypervisor, we are 
forced to run it within a virtual machine.

Basically, we would reassign the IP address delegated to eth0, to 
OVS's internal interface.  This works fine with ofp_action_output.

However, since we're unable to get it working with ofp_action_enqueue, 
we have to resort to a hack by creating a virtual interface (TAP) and 
adding it to the list of ports.  The problem here is that you cannot 
communicate directly over a TAP interface, so in order to get around 
this, we create yet another virtual interface and interconnect them 
using VDE (Virtual Distributed Ethernet).  In the end, the topology 
looks something like this:

|- sw (intenal)
|- eth0
|- tap0 <-> vde_switch <-> tap1

But now, due to this extra complexity, we are seeing all sorts of 
performance degradations.  I suspect this could be due to the fact 
that vde_switch is running in user-space.  So far I haven't been able 
to come up with a better solution.

I can see this being useful in a real world scenario as well.  Let's 
say you would like to rate limit traffic between a VM and the 
underlying hypervisor.

Hope this makes sense.

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 03:09:41PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 03:07:22PM -0700, Vjekoslav Brajkovic wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 07:56:11AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> > > It's because OpenFlow 1.0 says that the port in ofp_action_enqueue
> > > should "refer to a valid physical port (i.e. < OFPP_MAX) or
> > > OFPP_IN_PORT."  OFPP_LOCAL isn't either of those.
> > 
> > In that case, I'll redirect my question to openflow-spec mailing list, 
> > since this kind of a behaviour does not make much sense.
> 
> Fair enough.
> 
> What are you trying to accomplish by queuing to an internal port?  It
> does not, off-hand, sound useful.
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