[dpdk-dev] [RFC v2 0/2] ethdev: Enhancements to flow director filter

[Rahul Lakkireddy <rahul.lakkireddy@chelsio.com>]

This RFC series of patches attempt to extend the flow director filter to
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 an additional flow rte_eth_pkt_filter_flow which encapsulates
  ingress ports, l2 payload, vlan and ntuples.
- Adds an additional mask for the flow to allow range of values to be
  matched.
- Adds an ability to set both filters with masks (Maskfull) and
  without masks (Maskless).  Also allow prioritizing one of these
  filter types over the other when a packet matches several types.
- Adds a new behavior 'switch'.
- Adds 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 2 shows testpmd command line example to support packet filter
flow.

The patch series has been compile tested on all x86 gcc targets and the
current fdir filter supported drivers seem to return appropriate error
codes when this new flow type and the new action are not supported and
hence are not affected.

Posting this series mainly for discussion on API change. Once this is
agreeable then, I will post the cxgbe PMD changes to use the new API.

---
v2:
1. Added ttl to rte_eth_ipv4_flow and tc, flow_label, next_header,
   and hop_limit to rte_eth_ipv6_flow.

2. Added new field type to rte_eth_pkt_filter_flow to differentiate
   between maskfull and maskless filter types.

3. Added new field prio to rte_eth_pkt_filter_flow to allow setting
   priority over maskfull or maskless when packet matches multiple
   filter types.

4. Added new behavior sub op RTE_FDIR_BEHAVIOR_SUB_OP_SWAP to allow
   swapping fields in matched flows. For ex, useful when swapping mac
   addresses in hardware before switching.

5. Updated the testpmd example to reflect the above new changes.

6. Dropped Patch 3 since the ABI announcement has already been merged.

Rahul Lakkireddy (2):
  ethdev: add packet filter flow and new behavior switch to fdir
  testpmd: add an example to show packet filter flow

 app/test-pmd/cmdline.c          | 528 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-
 lib/librte_ether/rte_eth_ctrl.h | 127 +++++++++-
 2 files changed, 646 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)

-- 
2.5.3