Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next v6 3/3] openvswitch: enable NSH support

From: Hannes Frederic Sowa <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2017 12:30:09 +0200

"Yang, Yi" <[email-masked]> writes:

> I'm not sure what new action you expect to bring here, I think group
> action is just for this, as you said it isn't only bound to NSH, you can
> start a new thread to discuss this. I don't think it is in scope of NSH.

It is in scope of this discussion as you will provide a user space API
that makes the NSH context fields accessible from user space in a
certain way. If you commit to this, there is no way going back.

I haven't yet grasped the idea on how those fields will be used in OVS
besides load balancing. Even for load balancing the tunnel itself
(vxlan-gpe + UDP source port or ipv6 flowlabel) already provides enough
entropy to do per-flow load balancing. What else is needed?  Why a
context header for that? You just need multiple action chains and pick
one randomly.

The only protocol that I can compare that to is geneve with TLVs, but
the TLVs are global and uniquie and a property of the networking
forwarding backplane and not a property of the path inside a tenant. So
I expect this actually to be the first case where I think that matters.

Why are context labels that special that they are not part of tun_ops?

Thanks,
Hannes