[dpdk-dev] [RFC 0/5] Port Representor for control and monitoring of VF devices

Mohammad Abdul Awal mohammad.abdul.awal at intel.com
Fri Dec 22 15:31:25 CET 2017


Hi ALex,


On 21/12/2017 14:51, Alex Rosenbaum wrote:
> Declan, Mohammad,
>
> The submission [1] of steering action between switch ports clearly
> requires a switch model in DPDK.
> The Port Representor based on a virtual PMD broker on NIC ops
> (rte_dev_ops) does not provide the required functionality. Using NIC
> terminology and not Switch API's will lead to a dead-end. Moreover, it
> does not fit the Kernel design. We need to be careful from this ending
> up as two different deployment models for users, which is very bad.
> There was a long discussion about this in netdev ML [2], including the
> VEPA mode support.
>
> As described in the links Alejandro referenced earlier, each of the
> switch ports should be a real PMD, and switch operations should be
> applied on these PMD ports.
> This includes the steering redirection of traffic between switch ports
> [1], port ACL's to block/allow traffic, VST/VGT modes and anti
> spoofing, link trust mode [3] for promiscuous configuration, mirroring
> of switch port traffic, and Tx and Rx of switch port traffic to/from
> VF's port.
I agree that we need a switch_domain parameter. At the moment we do not 
have APIs implemented for all the switch operations you have mentioned 
above. So, we are planning separate RFC with switch _domain and related 
APIs.

>
> More over, building this as real PMD ports of a switch device removes
> the need to add a new broker framework all together.
> Each vendor just needs to map additional PMD ports during the probing
> stage.
That is very much possible as well. If we agree to probe all the ports 
during the initialization phase, we can have all the representors ready 
without any interaction from application and broker. On the other hand, 
we may require a broker structure to enable hotplug support.

> By adding a switchdev_id we can define these are ports
> associated to the same switching device, and can allow new port and
> inter-port actions.
>
> [1] http://dpdk.org/dev/patchwork/patch/32550/
> [2] https://www.spinics.net/lists/netdev/msg467375.html
> [2] https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/8-ip-link/
>
> Alex

Regards,
Awal.


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