On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 01:54:52PM +0000, Finucane, Stephen wrote: > 1. I understand that OVS 1.11 provides two ways to forward packets > from one table to another: the resubmit action and the goto_table > instruction. As the resubmit action is a Nicera extension to OpenFlow > should the goto_table instruction now be used in place of the resubmit > action (i.e. resubmit may be depreciated in time)?
If goto_table suits your purposes, then it is probably the best choice, because it is standardized. But resubmit is a superset of the functionality, because it may be used in the middle of a set of actions, rather than only at the end (control flow returns following the resubmit) and because it allows any table to be used, not just later tables. Those are useful properties and VMware controllers use them, so we are not likely to deprecate resubmit. > > 2. With regard to flow syntax the following piece from the "Flow > Syntax "section of the ofctl man page has confused me: > > table=number > ... > When this field is specified in add-flow, add-flows, mod-flows and > del-flows commands, it activates a Nicira extension to OpenFlow, which > as of this writing is only known to be implemented by Open vSwitch. > > Does this mean we are not actually dealing with "OpenFlow Tables"? If > not, what is the difference as they appear to be quite similar? The documentation is incomplete. In OF1.0, this uses the described extension, because OF1.0 didn't support this feature. OF1.1 and later support this feature natively, so OVS doesn't use any extension with those versions of OpenFlow. I sent out a patch to correct this documentation. > > 3. It is my understanding that ofproto implements a flow table that > supports wildcards, while the datapath's flow table support exact > match only. That was once true. The kernel module in OVS 1.11 and later, however, does support wildcards. (It doesn't change the basic principles of operation here.) > If this is the case how are the matches spread across multiple tables > in ofproto converted to a single dpif-compatible table. Is ofproto, as > I suspect, merely an abstraction and the multiple tables get flattened > into one table or does dpif actually support multiple tables? I've > investigated dpif-provider.c without success. The multiple tables get flattened. _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@openvswitch.org http://openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
