[RFC PATCH 0/4] VRF support in FIB library

[Medvedkin, Vladimir]

Hi Morten,

On 3/23/2026 9:01 AM, Morten Brørup wrote:
>> From: Stephen Hemminger [mailto:stephen at networkplumber.org]
>> Sent: Sunday, 22 March 2026 17.44
>>
>> On Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:42:11 +0000
>> Vladimir Medvedkin <vladimir.medvedkin at intel.com> wrote:
>>
>>> This series adds multi-VRF support to both IPv4 and IPv6 FIB paths by
>>> allowing a single FIB instance to host multiple isolated routing
>> domains.
>>> Currently FIB instance represents one routing instance. For workloads
>> that
>>> need multiple VRFs, the only option is to create multiple FIB
>> objects. In a
>>> burst oriented datapath, packets in the same batch can belong to
>> different VRFs, so
>>> the application either does per-packet lookup in different FIB
>> instances or
>>> regroups packets by VRF before lookup. Both approaches are expensive.
>>>
>>> To remove that cost, this series keeps all VRFs inside one FIB
>> instance and
>>> extends lookup input with per-packet VRF IDs.
>>>
>>> The design follows the existing fast-path structure for both
>> families. IPv4 and
>>> IPv6 use multi-ary trees with a 2^24 associativity on a first level
>> (tbl24). The
>>> first-level table scales per configured VRF. This increases memory
>> usage, but
>>> keeps performance and lookup complexity on par with non-VRF
>> implementation.
> I noticed the suggested API uses separate parameters for the VRF and IP.
> How about using one parameter, a structure containing the {VRF, IP} tuple, instead?
> I'm mainly thinking about the bulk operations, where passing one array seems more intuitive than passing two arrays.

I found this design to be more intuitive and kind of backward 
compatible, many apps already create an array of addresses, adding an 
extra array with corresponding VRFs maynotbecounterintuitive IMO.

ButwhatIfindmoreimportantisperformance,atleastthisapproachis 
moreconvenientforvectorization.

>
>>
>> Not sure at all if this the right way to do VRF.
>> There are multiple ways to do VRF, the Linux way, the Cisco way, ...
> I think a shared table operating on the {VRF, IP} tuple makes sense.
> If a table instance per VRF is preferred, that is still supported.
>
> Can you elaborate what Linux and Cisco does differently than this?
>
>>
>>
>> This needs way more documentation and also an example.
> +1
>
>> Like an option to l3fwd. And also an implementation in testpmd.

-- 
Regards,
Vladimir