Hi Alexandra, Ilya, On 12/19/25 1:18 PM, Ilya Maximets wrote: > 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. >
I managed to post the patch now, hopefully in time for someone to review it before soft freeze: https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/openvswitch/patch/[email protected]/ I also ran OVN tests (with a modified version of OVN that still only uses 16 registers but compiles with OVS that supports 32 registers) and CI looked green there too. > 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. > I agree, let's figure out the right way to consume this in OVN in the future. Regards, Dumitru > Best regards, Ilya Maximets. > _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/ovs-dev
