Hi Bruce, On 30/01/2025 17:54, Bruce Richardson wrote: > On Thu, Jan 30, 2025 at 04:14:42PM +0000, Vladimir Medvedkin wrote: >> Currently ICE PMD uses group attribute to select the appropriate HW engine >> to offload the flow. This behavior violates the rte_flow API, existing >> documentation/examples, and reveals hardware specific details. >> >> This patch eliminates the use of the group attribute and runs each engine >> parser in the order they work in the HW pipeline. >> >> Fixes: 9c5f0070fa3f ("net/ice: map group to pipeline stage") >> Cc:qi.z.zhang@intel.com >> Cc:stable@dpdk.org >> >> Signed-off-by: Vladimir Medvedkin > Thanks, this seems a great idea, to automatically put the flow in place. > > Question: is there ever a scenario where a user may need, or want, to > override the automatic choice made here? Or is it just the case that once > the flow is installed, it works the same whatever group it's added into? > I would assume the latter, but just want to confirm. I don't think a user might have to worry about the internals of the NIC filters. Thesefiltersperformdifferent lookups: ACL provides wildcard matching, when FDIR in an exact match, so it depends on what kind of mask is used for a particular field, for example: I want to install _exact_match_ rule: - I use FDIR engine: flow create 0 ingress group 2 pattern eth / ipv4 dst spec 192.168.0.1 dst mask 255.255.255.255 / end actions drop / end and it works as expected. - I use ACL engine: flow create 0 ingress group 2 pattern eth / ipv4 dst spec 192.168.0.1 dst mask 255.255.255.255 / end actions drop / end and parser throws an error: Invalid IPv4 mask.: Invalid argument I want to install _wildcard_match_ rule: - I use FDIR engine: flow create 0 ingress group 2 pattern eth / ipv4 dst spec 192.168.0.1 dst mask 255.255.255.254 / end actions drop / end doesn't work, Invalid action.: Invalid argument - I use ACL engine:flow create 0 ingress group 1 pattern eth / ipv4 dst spec 192.168.0.1 dst mask 255.255.0.255 / end actions drop / end and it works as expected > /Bruce -- Regards, Vladimir