Re: [dpdk-dev] [PATCH 00/10] cxgbe: Add flow director support

[Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com>]

On Wed, Feb 03, 2016 at 02:02:21PM +0530, Rahul Lakkireddy wrote:
> This series of patches extend the flow director filter and add support
> for Chelsio T5 hardware filtering capabilities.
> 
> Chelsio T5 supports carrying out filtering in hardware which supports 3
> actions to carry out on a packet which hit a filter viz.
> 
> 1. Action Pass - Packets hitting a filter rule can be directed to a
>    particular RXQ.
> 
> 2. Action Drop - Packets hitting a filter rule are dropped in h/w.
> 
> 3. Action Switch - Packets hitting a filter rule can be switched in h/w
>    from one port to another, without involvement of host.  Also, the
>    action Switch also supports rewrite of src-mac/dst-mac headers as
>    well as rewrite of vlan headers.  It also supports rewrite of IP
>    headers and thereby, supports NAT (Network Address Translation)
>    in h/w.
> 
> Also, each filter rule can optionally support specifying a mask value
> i.e. it's possible to create a filter rule for an entire subnet of IP
> addresses or a range of tcp/udp ports, etc.
> 
> Patch 1 does the following:
> - Adds a new flow RTE_ETH_FLOW_RAW_PKT to allow specifying a generic
>   flow.
> - Adds an additional generic array to rte_eth_fdir_flow to allow
>   specifying generic flow input.
> - Adds an additional mask for the flow input to allow range of values
>   to be matched in the flow input.
> - Adds a new behavior 'switch'.
> - Adds a generic array to hold behavior arguments that can be passed
>   when a particular behavior is taken. For ex: in case of action
>   'switch', pass additional 4-tuple to allow rewriting src/dst ip and
>   port addresses to support NAT'ing.
> 
Patch 1 of this set is not mergable for 16.04 because there is no agreement on
the way forward for filtering APIs, and the fact that the changes proposed are
not acceptable to the maintainers as-is.
Therefore the whole patchset must be deferred for a later release. I'm updating
the status in patchwork to "Changes Requested".

Regards,
/Bruce