[dpdk-dev] [PATCH v5 0/6] Flow entites behavior on port restart

[Ferruh Yigit]

On 11/2/2021 1:54 PM, Dmitry Kozlyuk wrote:
> It is unspecified whether flow rules and indirect actions are kept
> when a port is stopped, possibly reconfigured, and started again.
> Vendors approach the topic differently, e.g. mlx5 and i40e PMD
> disagree in whether flow rules can be kept, and mlx5 PMD would keep
> indirect actions. In the end, applications are greatly affected
> by whatever contract there is and need to know it.
> 
> Applications may wish to restart the port to reconfigure it,
> e.g. switch offloads or even modify queues.
> Keeping rte_flow entities enables application improvements:
> 1. Since keeping the rules across restart comes with the ability
>     to create rules before the device is started. This allows
>     to have all the rules created at the moment of start,
>     so that there is no time frame when traffic is coming already,
>     but the rules are not yet created (restored).
> 2. When a rule or an indirect action has some associated state,
>     such as a counter, application saves the need to keep
>     additional state in order to cope with information loss
>     if such an entity would be destroyed.
> 
> It is proposed to advertise capabilities of keeping flow rules
> and indirect actions (as a special case of shared object)
> using a combination of ethdev info and rte_flow calls.
> Then a bug is fixed in mlx5 PMD that prevented indirect RSS action
> from being kept, and the driver starts advertising the new capability.
> 
> Prior discussions:
> 1) http://inbox.dpdk.org/dev/20210727073121.895620-1-dkozlyuk@nvidia.com/
> 2) http://inbox.dpdk.org/dev/20210901085516.3647814-1-dkozlyuk@nvidia.com/
> 
> v5:
>       1. Fix rebase conflicts.

I am still getting conflicts. Did you rebase it on top of next-net?