Subject: Re: [patch net-next RFC 0/4] introduce infrastructure for support of switch chip datapath

From: Jamal Hadi Salim <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 18:08:41 -0400

On 03/25/14 17:39, tgraf wrote:
> On 03/25/14 at 01:00pm, Florian Fainelli wrote:

>
> I think all it takes is to correctly apply the existing separation
> which is already available but not applied right now.
>
> We already have the L2/L3 separation in place:
>
> net_device vs in_device/inet6_dev/....
>
> A pure L2 device that will never do L3 on the CPU would only
> need to set a flag which we check before allocating a in_device
> and therefore prevent from all the L3 configs to be exposed.

I think we need much deeper discussion on the topic of other
functions that may not be directly connected to netdevs
(v4/6 forwarding, ACL, etc).
In my opinion - if a chip knows how to do L3, then i have
a choice to just send a FIB add via netlink and specify
where it goes (hardware vs software or both).
The bridge ports with underlying hardware FDB entries as
an example already work this way (although i am not fond
of the naming convention used).

cheers,
jamal