On Thu, Mar 08, 2018 at 07:51:23PM +0800, Xiao Liang wrote: > In my experience, one thing I feel inconvenient is that some switches > don't support controller-initiated connections. It would be helpful > for testing and debugging if ovs-ofctl could be used. > I'd propose an openflow proxy which is responsible for accepting and > maintaining connections from switches, opening sockets for controllers > to connect, and proxy messages between them. So that openflow tools > like ovs-ofctl can operate on these switches. > Another approach might be adding a "passive mode" to ovs-ofctl, which > listens for connections, and opens an interactive shell to run > commands.
I guess that this is a problem with non-OVS switches? OVS does support controller-initiated connections. The proxy that you describe is going to be difficult to write because to be most useful it would have to multiplex multiple connections into a single connection. OpenFlow connections are not stateless, so it would have to figure out how to effectively partition the desires of multiple clients into a single session. I haven't thought through all the necessary logic, but it would not be trivial. I think that the ovs-ofctl passive mode that you describe is similar in practice to writing a proxy: probably, it would internally start a proxy and then allow the user to access it. It might be easiest to actually implement it as a mode for the proxy that starts a subshell. I think that this is a worthy project, for someone for whom support for non-OVS switches is important, and I'd encourage a motivated developer to work on it. _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/ovs-discuss
