On 12/18/25 6:05 PM, Rukomoinikova Aleksandra wrote: > Hi everyone! > > I added maintainers to copy because I really need your opinion) > > It seems we are already exceeding the number of available registers in > Open vSwitch, at least at the controller level. > > Currently, all registers accessible to the controller are already in > use. Earlier in this thread, I sent RFC patch, which at the moment is > nothing more than a messy proof of concept, precisely because I ran into > the issue of lacking registers at the controller level. My goal is > passing register values between pipelines, which can be possible only > with ovn-controller registers. For now, I've implemented this through a > very dirty workaround using registers from northd, which is just > terrible, but I couldn't find another option. > > What do you think: should we expand the number of registers in Open > vSwitch? It seems it's time! If it seems it's not yet the right moment, > should I add a separate mff_ field in OVS? I initially dismissed this > idea because transferring a routing table doesn't really fit into the > OpenFlow concept. > > Thanks in advance! If we agree that it's time to expand the registers, I > would like to take this on myself. Hi! The increase of the number of registers was brought up multiple times, I believe, in the recent years. The latest conversation happened in the following thread just recently: https://mail.openvswitch.org/pipermail/ovs-dev/2025-October/426703.html
And, AFAIK, Dumitru already started working on that some time ago with a plan to likely post it in time for the OVS 3.7 soft freeze. So, we may hopefully see a patch for that soon. FWIW, there was also an off-list conversation about detection of support for new registers and how to properly handle turning new features on and off based on that. Primarily in context of maintainability. E.g. we likely need to just not allow use of new features that require extra registers instead of trying to work around the limitation and implement the same feature differently based on availability. But that's a separate topic that can be explored when implementing first features that need new registers in OVN. Best regards, Ilya Maximets. _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/ovs-dev
