On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 11:29:55PM -0700, Murphy McCauley wrote:
> On Apr 22, 2014, at 8:54 AM, Ben Pfaff <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 07:50:31PM -0700, Murphy McCauley wrote:
> >> I recently found a technique I'd used with OVS 1.9 no longer worked under 
> >> OVS built from master a few days ago.  Here's a pretty minimal example:
> >> 
> >> table=0, actions=resubmit(,2),resubmit(,1)
> >> table=1, reg1=0 
> >> actions=learn(table=2,hard_timeout=1,load:1->NXM_NX_REG1[]),controller
> >> 
> >> In this example, it's a poor man's controller rate limiter.  The previous 
> >> (and expected) behavior is that you can spam packets (e.g., ping -i 0.1) 
> >> and only one per second goes to the controller.  The observed behavior on 
> >> new versions of OVS is that nothing ever comes to the controller.
> >> 
> >> Adding a reg1=1 match to table 1, it was clear the matching was working 
> >> right (the packet counts of the table 1 rules summed to the packet count 
> >> of the table 0 rule).  But still nothing at the controller.  A flood 
> >> action, however, works just fine -- one per second.  This got me thinking 
> >> it's a fast path/slow path issue.  I did some digging and found:
> >> 
> >> Before 4dff909 (Move odp_actions from subfacet to facet), things worked as 
> >> expected.  After this commit, it didn't work, but I found a workaround 
> >> based on a glance through the diff and a hunch: if I put a controller 
> >> action in the table 0 rule too, both controller actions worked.  I was 
> >> inspired to try this by the change around line 5027.  Without the table 0 
> >> controller action, facet_revalidate() gives up when the facet goes from 
> >> fast path to slow path.  With it, I am guessing it starts out on the slow 
> >> path and never changes.  Whether any of that is significant or not, by 
> >> sending to a nonexistent controller ID in table 0, I had the behavior I 
> >> wanted again.
> >> 
> >> Unfortunately, this workaround didn't work on master.  So more digging.  
> >> It turns out that after 3d9c5e5 (Handle learn action flow mods 
> >> asynchronously), the workaround wasn't required anymore and things were 
> >> back to working as expected.
> >> 
> >> Obviously this didn't last forever.  Specifically, when 9129672 (Move 
> >> "learn" actions into individual threads) more or less undid the previous, 
> >> even the workaround doesn't work.
> >> 
> >> I tried to find anything related on the mailing list and didn't come up 
> >> with anything.  Is it unknown?  Is there any reason why this *shouldn't* 
> >> work?  Any thoughts on getting it to work again?
> > 
> > At a glance, this should work (although it's not a use case I've
> > considered before).  It's not obvious to me why it doesn't.  If you
> > figure out a fix (though I'd like to take a look myself, I don't have
> > the time), please submit it, and then we'll add a test to avoid future
> > regression.
> 
> Hi, Ben, thanks for confirming that it should work.
> 
> I believe the reason it doesn't lies in handle_upcalls(), which calls 
> xlate_actions() without the packet and later calls 
> xlate_actions_for_side_effects() with the packet which should actually send 
> to the controller.  Unfortunately, by the time the actions are xlated the 
> second time, the world has changed due to the flow_mod resulting from the 
> learn action the first time they were xlated.  The result is that things go 
> differently when trying to run the side effects -- we now hit the newly 
> learned rule.  Before 9129672, the flow_mods were queued and I guess hadn't 
> actually executed when xlate_actions_for_side_effects() ran.
> I think the additional xlate stems from bcd2633 (Store relevant fields for 
> wildcarding in facet).
> 
> I don't know the code well enough to know if there's a particularly elegant 
> way of solving this.  Someone else must have a better idea. :)
> 
> A sidenote is that the actions are xlated both times with may_learn, which 
> seemed odd to me.  Just for fun I turned it off the second time (which, of 
> course, is the not-useful-to-me case), and it didn't change the results of 
> make check for whatever that's worth.

Thanks for the insight.  That ought to help.
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