[RFC PATCH v2 0/7] VRF support in FIB library

[Stephen Hemminger]

On Wed, 14 Oct 2026 18:39:14 +0000
Vladimir Medvedkin <vladimir.medvedkin at intel.com> wrote:

> This series adds multi-VRF support to the IPv4 FIB, allowing a single FIB
> instance to host multiple isolated routing tables.
> 
> Today a FIB instance is a single routing table, so an application serving
> several VRFs needs one FIB per VRF. In a burst oriented datapath packets of
> one burst can belong to different VRFs, and the application either does
> per-packet lookups in different FIBs or regroups the burst by VRF before
> the lookup. Both are expensive. With this series all the VRFs live in one
> FIB, the bulk lookup takes a VRF ID per address, and the existing API
> operates on VRF 0.
> 
> v1 replicated the 16M entry tbl24 per VRF. That kept the lookup on par with
> the single VRF case, but memory grew linearly with the number of VRFs,
> which was the main concern raised on v1. v2 resolves the issue by adding
> of two dataplane algorithms with different memory/lookup trade-offs.
> 
> DIR8-16-8 is a new three level variant of DIR-24-8 with 8, 16 and 8 bit
> strides. Only the 256 entry root table (2 KB) is replicated per VRF; the
> tbl16 and tbl8 groups come from pools shared by all the VRFs, so memory
> follows the routes actually installed rather than the number of VRFs. The
> cost is an extra memory access for prefixes longer than /8.
> 
> DIR-24-8 gets multi-VRF support by resolving the VRF after the longest
> prefix match, along the lines Konstantin suggested on v1. Instead of a
> vector of next hops per prefix, a single tbl24_8 shared by all the VRFs
> returns an internal prefix ID, and a hash table keyed by {VRF, prefix ID}
> returns the next hop, a miss meaning the VRF default next hop. The aim is
> to resolve the VRF with a single memory access, so buckets hold 8 records
> and there is no probing beyond the bucket.


The problem with existing FIB lookups is they are space intensive.
They tradeoff memory for cache misses. Every level of indirection adds
another cache miss.

Not sure they work well for VRF case at all. Normal LPM is more compact.
For normal mortal size machines having multiple VRF's is going to be huge.
How big are you envisioning this?