[dpdk-dev] [PATCH 7/9] librte_ethdev: add ESP and AH flow types to RSS

[Stephen Hemminger]

On Tue, 10 Dec 2019 12:57:10 +0000
Bernard Iremonger <bernard.iremonger at intel.com> wrote:

> Add flow types for the following PCTYPE's in the DDP ipsec profile:
> 14: IPV6 ESP
> 15: IPV4 ESP
> 16: IPV6 AH
> 17: IPV4 AH
> 18: IPV6 UDP ESP
> 19: IPV4 UDP ESP
> 
> Add the following RSS macros for IPsec:
> ETH_RSS_ESP
> ETH_RSS_AH
> ETH_RSS_IPSEC
> 
> Signed-off-by: Bernard Iremonger <bernard.iremonger at intel.com>
>

The addition of additional flow matching is good but rte_flow still has problems.
1. There is little to know documentation about the semantics. What happens with the N*M combinations of
   possible flow rules, what is accepted and what does hardware do?
2. Mellanox, Intel, and Broadcom keep adding hardware match rules but there is no corresponding
   baseline in software. The SW flow classifier now is a trivial exercise that only matches tuples;
   it does not have any of the complex semantics of the rest of rte_flow.

If this were a standards body, it would be rejected.

Sorry to pick on this patch, but at some point the base infrastructure needs fixing
before allowing more dog piling on of features.