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From: Shradha Shah <sshah@solarflare•com>
To: Ben Hutchings <bhutchings@solarflare•com>
Cc: <jhs@mojatatu•com>, John Fastabend <john.r.fastabend@intel•com>,
	Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta•com>, <roprabhu@cisco•com>,
	<netdev@vger•kernel.org>, <mst@redhat•com>, <chrisw@redhat•com>,
	<davem@davemloft•net>, <gregory.v.rose@intel•com>,
	<kvm@vger•kernel.org>, <sri@us•ibm.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v0 1/2] net: bridge: propagate FDB table into hardware
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:18:57 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <4F3D56A1.3030502@solarflare.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1329364728.3048.159.camel@deadeye>

Hello,

Please find my comments inline.

Regards,
Shradha Shah

On 02/16/2012 03:58 AM, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> [I'm just catching up with this after getting my own driver changes into
> shape.]
> 
> On Fri, 2012-02-10 at 10:18 -0500, jamal wrote:
>> Hi John,
>>
>> I went backwards to summarize at the top after going through your email.
>>
>> TL;DR version 0.1: 
>> you provide a good use case where it makes sense to do things in the
>> kernel. IMO, you could make the same arguement if your embedded switch
>> could do ACLs, IPv4 forwarding etc. And the kernel bloats.
>> I am always bigoted to move all policy control to user space instead of
>> bloating in the kernel.
> [...]
>>> Now here is the potential issue,
>>>
>>> (G) The frame transmitted from ethx.y with the destination address of
>>>     veth0 but the embedded switch is not a learning switch. If the FDB
>>>     update is done in user space its possible (likely?) that the FDB
>>>     entry for veth0 has not been added to the embedded switch yet. 
>>
>> Ok, got it - so the catch here is the switch is not capable of learning.
>> I think this depends on where learning is done. Your intent is to
>> use the S/W bridge as something that does the learning for you i.e in
>> the kernel. This makes the s/w bridge part of MUST-have-for-this-to-run.
>> And that maybe the case for your use case.
> [...]
> 
> Well, in addition, there are SR-IOV network adapters that don't have any
> bridge.  For these, the software bridge is necessary to handle
> multicast, broadcast and forwarding between local ports, not only to do
> learning.
> 
> Solarflare's implementation of accelerated guest networking (which
> Shradha and I are gradually sending upstream) builds on libvirt's
> existing support for software bridges and assigns VFs to guests as a
> means to offload some of the forwarding.

I am also trying to work with bridging using macvtap. Libvirt supports
macvtap in four modes; vepa, bridge, private and passthrough mode.
Macvtap used in the bridge mode will work similar to a software bridge and 
will improve performance.

> 
> If and when we implement a hardware bridge, we would probably still want
> to keep the software bridge as a fallback.  If a guest is dependent on a
> VF that's connected to a hardware bridge, it becomes impossible or at
> least very disruptive to migrate it to another host that doesn't have a
> compatible VF available.
> 
> Ben.
> 



  reply	other threads:[~2012-02-16 19:18 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 52+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2012-02-09  3:22 [RFC PATCH v0 1/2] net: bridge: propagate FDB table into hardware John Fastabend
2012-02-09  3:22 ` [RFC PATCH v0 2/2] ixgbe: add NETIF_F_HW_FDB to supported flags John Fastabend
2012-02-09  4:36 ` [RFC PATCH v0 1/2] net: bridge: propagate FDB table into hardware Stephen Hemminger
2012-02-09 17:36   ` John Fastabend
2012-02-09 17:40     ` Stephen Hemminger
2012-02-09 17:52       ` John Fastabend
2012-02-09 21:11         ` jamal
2012-02-10  2:14           ` John Fastabend
2012-02-10  4:14             ` John Fastabend
2012-02-10 15:18               ` jamal
2012-02-10 16:39                 ` Stephen Hemminger
2012-02-13 13:54                   ` jamal
2012-02-13 15:13                 ` John Fastabend
2012-02-14 13:18                   ` jamal
2012-02-14 18:57                     ` John Fastabend
2012-02-14 19:05                       ` Stephen Hemminger
2012-02-14 19:08                         ` John Fastabend
2012-02-15 14:10                       ` Jamal Hadi Salim
2012-02-16  1:26                         ` John Fastabend
2012-02-17 14:28                           ` jamal
2012-02-17 17:10                             ` John Fastabend
2012-02-18 12:41                               ` jamal
2012-02-29  4:40                                 ` John Fastabend
2012-02-29  5:14                                   ` John Fastabend
2012-02-29 13:57                                     ` Jamal Hadi Salim
2012-02-29 13:56                                   ` Jamal Hadi Salim
2012-02-29 17:25                                     ` John Fastabend
2012-02-29 17:52                                       ` Stephen Hemminger
2012-02-29 18:19                                         ` John Fastabend
2012-03-01 13:36                                           ` Jamal Hadi Salim
2012-03-01 22:17                                             ` John Fastabend
2012-03-02 13:20                                               ` jamal
2012-03-05 17:00                                             ` Lennert Buytenhek
2012-03-01 13:24                                       ` Jamal Hadi Salim
2012-03-01 14:14                                       ` Michael S. Tsirkin
2012-03-01 22:10                                         ` John Fastabend
2012-03-05 16:53                                   ` Lennert Buytenhek
2012-03-06  3:45                                     ` John Fastabend
2012-03-06 14:15                                       ` Lennert Buytenhek
2012-03-06 13:42                                     ` jamal
2012-03-06 14:09                                       ` Lennert Buytenhek
2012-03-07 14:11                                         ` Jamal Hadi Salim
2012-03-12  8:48                                           ` Lennert Buytenhek
2012-03-13 13:52                                             ` Jamal Hadi Salim
2012-02-16  3:58                 ` Ben Hutchings
2012-02-16 19:18                   ` Shradha Shah [this message]
2012-02-17 14:37                   ` jamal
2012-02-10 13:45     ` Roopa Prabhu
2012-02-09 18:14 ` Sridhar Samudrala
2012-02-09 20:30   ` John Fastabend
2012-02-10  0:39     ` Sridhar Samudrala
2012-02-10  0:51       ` John Fastabend

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