[dpdk-dev] [PATCH v2 1/6] net/mlx5: lay groundwork for switch offloads

[Ferruh Yigit]

On 7/13/2018 10:40 AM, Adrien Mazarguil wrote:
> With mlx5, unlike normal flow rules implemented through Verbs for traffic
> emitted and received by the application, those targeting different logical
> ports of the device (VF representors for instance) are offloaded at the
> switch level and must be configured through Netlink (TC interface).
> 
> This patch adds preliminary support to manage such flow rules through the
> flow API (rte_flow).
> 
> Instead of rewriting tons of Netlink helpers and as previously suggested by
> Stephen [1], this patch introduces a new dependency to libmnl [2]
> (LGPL-2.1) when compiling mlx5.
> 
> [1] https://mails.dpdk.org/archives/dev/2018-March/092676.html
> [2] https://netfilter.org/projects/libmnl/

Just to highlight this new PMD level dependency to libmnl.

tap pmd also uses netlink and vdev_netvsc also does nl communication, perhaps we
can discuss unifying netlink usage around this new library.

> 
> Signed-off-by: Adrien Mazarguil <adrien.mazarguil at 6wind.com>
> Acked-by: Nelio Laranjeiro <nelio.laranjeiro at 6wind.com>
> Cc: Yongseok Koh <yskoh at mellanox.com>
> --
> v2 changes:
> 
> - Added NETLINK_CAP_ACK definition if missing from the host system. This
>   parameter is also not mandatory anymore and won't prevent creation of
>   NL sockets when not supported.
> - Modified mlx5_nl_flow_nl_ack() and mlx5_nl_flow_init() to consume the
>   least amount of stack space based on message size, instead of the fixed
>   MNL_SOCKET_BUFFER_SIZE which is quite large.

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