Re: [dpdk-dev] [RFC] ethdev: add generic L2/L3 tunnel encapsulation actions

[Ori Kam <orika@mellanox.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stephen Hemminger [mailto:stephen@networkplumber.org]
> Sent: Monday, July 30, 2018 8:29 PM
> To: Ori Kam <orika@mellanox.com>
> Cc: Xueming(Steven) Li <xuemingl@mellanox.com>; Dekel Peled
> <dekelp@mellanox.com>; Shahaf Shuler <shahafs@mellanox.com>; Adrien
> Mazarguil <adrien.mazarguil@6wind.com>; Thomas Monjalon
> <thomas@monjalon.net>; Yongseok Koh <yskoh@mellanox.com>;
> ferruh.yigit@intel.com; arybchenko@solarflare.com; dev@dpdk.org
> Subject: Re: [dpdk-dev] [RFC] ethdev: add generic L2/L3 tunnel
> encapsulation actions
> 
> On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 19:19:25 +0300
> Ori Kam <orika@mellanox.com> wrote:
> 
> > Currenlty the encap/decap actions only support encapsulation
> > of VXLAN and NVGRE L2 packets.
> > There is a need to add more L2 tunnels and also L3 tunnels.
> >
> > One issue with the current approch is the duplication of code.
> > For example the code for handling NVGRE and VXLAN are exactly the
> same,
> > and each new tunnel will have the same exact structure.
> >
> > Last issue with the current approach is the use of rte_items.
> > The most significant issue with that is that the PMD needs to convert
> > the items and this hurts the insertion rate. Other issue is that
> > the rte_item has 3 members while we only need the spec (last and mask
> > are useless). I know that the extra member have only small memory
> > impact but considering that we can have millions of rules, this became
> > more important consideration, and it is bad practice to add a variable
> > that is never used.
> >
> > My suggestion is to create 2 commands, one for encapsulation of L2
> > packets and one for encapsulation of L3 tunnels.
> > The parameters for those functions will be a uint8_t buffer with
> > a length parameter.
> >
> > The current approach is not implemented yet in drivers yet, and
> > is marked as experimental, so it should be removed.
> >
> > Any comments will be hugely appreciated.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Ori Kam <orika@mellanox.com>
> 
> What about binary and source compatibilities with older release?

I'm not sure what you mean, currently this feature is not implemented 
In any PMD (as far as I can see) so no one uses it, and it is marked as
experimental. In any case if this is an issue we can keep the old one and just 
add the new one. 

Best,
Ori