Re: [RFC] Generic flow director/filtering/classification API

[...]

quoted

I'm not sure I understand 'bit granularity' here. I would say we have
devices now that have rather strange restrictions due to hardware
implementation. Going forward we should get better hardware and a lot
of this will go away in my view. Yes this is a long term view and
doesn't help the current state. The overall point you are making is
the sum off all these strange/odd bits in the hardware implementation
means capabilities queries are very difficult to guarantee. On existing
hardware and I think you've convinced me. Thanks ;)

Precisely. By "bit granularity" I meant that while it is fairly easy to
report whether bit-masking is supported on protocol fields such as MAC
addresses at all, devices may have restrictions on the possible bit-masks,
like they may only have an effect at byte level (0xff), may not allow
specific bits (broadcast) or there even may be a fixed set of bit-masks to
choose from.

Yep lots of strange hardware implementation voodoo here.

[...]

quoted

quoted

I understand, however I think this approach may be too low-level to express
all the possible combinations. This graph would have to include possible
actions for each possible pattern, all while considering that some actions
are not possible with some patterns and that there are exclusive actions.

Really? You have hardware that has dependencies between the parser and
the supported actions? Ugh...

Not that I know of actually, even though we cannot rule out this
possibility.

Here are the possible cases I have in mind with existing HW:

- Too many actions specified for a single rule, even though each of them is
  otherwise supported.

Yep most hardware will have this restriction.

- Performing several encap/decap actions. None are defined in the initial
  specification but these are already planned.

Great this is certainly needed.

- Assuming there is a single table from the application point of view
  (separate discussion for the other thread), some actions may only be
  possible with the right pattern item or meta item. Asking HW to perform
  tunnel decap may only be safe if the pattern specifically matches that
  protocol.

Yep continue in other thread.

quoted

If the hardware has separate tables then we shouldn't try to have the
PMD flatten those into a single table because we will have no way of
knowing how to do that. (I'll respond to the other thread on this in
an attempt to not get to scattered).

OK, will reply there as well.

quoted

quoted

Also while memory consumption is not really an issue, such a graph may be
huge. It could take a while for the PMD to update it when adding a rule
impacting capabilities.

Ugh... I wouldn't suggest updating the capabilities at runtime like
this. But I see your point if the graph has to _guarantee_ correctness
how does it represent limited number of masks and other strange hw,
its unfortunate the hardware isn't more regular.

You have convinced me that guaranteed correctness via capabilities
is going to difficult for many types of devices although not all.

I'll just add that these capabilities also depend on side effects of
configuration performed outside the scope of this API. The way queues are
(re)initialized or offloads configured may affect them. RSS configuration is
the most obvious example.

OK.

[...]

quoted

My concern is this non-determinism will create performance issues in
the network because when a flow may or may not be offloaded this can
have a rather significant impact on its performance. This can make
debugging network wide performance miserable when at time X I get
performance X and then for whatever reason something degrades to
software and at time Y I get some performance Y << X. I suspect that
in general applications will bind tightly with hardware they know
works.

You are right, performance determinism is not taken into account at all, at
least not yet. It should not be an issue at the beginning as long as the
API has the ability evolve later for applications that need it.

Just an idea, could some kind of meta pattern items specifying time
constraints for a rule address this issue? Say, how long (cycles/ms) the PMD
may take to query/apply/delete the rule. If it cannot be guaranteed, the
rule cannot be created. Applications could mantain statistic counters about
failed rules to determine if performance issues are caused by the inability
to create them.

It seems a bit heavy to me to have each PMD driver implementing
something like this. But it would be interesting to explore probably
after the basic support is implemented though.

[...]

quoted

quoted

For individual points:

(i) should be doable with the query API without recompiling DPDK as well,
the fact API/ABI breakage must be avoided being part of the requirements. If
you think there is a problem regarding this, can you provide a specific
example?

What I was after you noted yourself in the doc here,

"PMDs can rely on this capability to simulate support for protocols with
fixed headers not directly recognized by hardware."

I was trying to get variable header support with the RAW capabilities. A
parse graph supports this for example the proposed query API does not.

OK, I see, however the RAW capability itself may not be supported everywhere
in patterns. What I described is that PMDs, not applications, could leverage
the RAW abilities of underlying devices to implement otherwise unsupported
but fixed patterns.

So basically you would like to expose the ability to describe fixed protocol
definitions following RAW patterns, as in:

Correct for say some new tunnel metadata or something.

 ETH / RAW / IP / UDP / ...

While with such a pattern the current specification makes RAW (4.1.4.2) and
IP start matching from the same offset as two different branches, in effect
you cannot specify a fixed protocol following a RAW item.

What this means though is for every new protocol we will need to rebuild
drivers and dpdk. For a shared lib DPDK environment or a Linux
distribution this can be painful. It would be best to avoid this.

It is defined that way because I do not see how HW could parse higher level
protocols after having given up due to a RAW pattern, however assuming the
entire stack is described only using RAW patterns I guess it could be done.

Such a pattern could be generated from a separate function before feeding it
to rte_flow_create(), or translated by the PMD afterwards assuming a
separate meta item such as RAW_END exists to signal the end of a RAW layer.
Of course processing this would be more expensive.

Or the supported parse graph could be fetched from the hardware with the
values for each protocol so that the programming interface is the same.
The well known protocols could keep the 'enum values' in the header
rte_flow_item_type enum so that users would not be required to do
the parse graph but for new or experimental protocols we could query
the parse graph and get the programming pattern matching id for them.

The normal flow would be unchanged but we don't get stuck upgrading
everything to add our own protocol. So the flow would be,

 rte_get_parse_graph(graph);
 flow_item_proto = is_my_proto_supported(graph);

 pattern = build_flow_match(flow_item_proto, value, mask);
 action = build_action();
 rte_flow_create(my_port, pattern, action);

The only change to the API proposed to support this would be to allow
unsupported RTE_FLOW_ values to be pushed to the hardware and define
a range of values that are reserved for use by the parse graph discover.

This would not have to be any more expensive.

[...]

quoted

quoted

quoted

quoted

So you can put it after "known"
variable length headers like IP. The limitation is it can't get past
undefined variable length headers.

RTE_FLOW_ITEM_TYPE_ANY is made for that purpose. Is that what you are
looking for?

But FLOW_ITEM_TYPE_ANY skips "any" header type is my understanding if
we have new variable length header in the future we will have to add
a new type RTE_FLOW_ITEM_TYPE_FOO for example. The RAW type will work
for fixed headers as noted above.

I'm (slowly) starting to get it. How about the suggestion I made above for
RAW items then?

hmm for performance reasons building an entire graph up using RAW items
seems to be a bit heavy. Another alternative to the above parse graph
notion would be to allow users to add RAW node definitions at init time
and have the PMD give a ID back for those. Then the new node could be
used just like any other RTE_FLOW_ITEM_TYPE in a pattern.

Something like,

	ret_flow_item_type_foo = rte_create_raw_node(foo_raw_pattern)
	ret_flow_item_type_bar = rte_create_raw_node(bar_raw_pattern)

then allow ret_flow_item_type_{foo|bar} to be used in subsequent
pattern matching items. And if the hardware can not support this return
an error from the initial rte_create_raw_node() API call.

Do any either of those proposals sound like reasonable extensions?

[...]

quoted

The two open items from me are do we need to support adding new variable
length headers? And how do we handle multiple tables I'll take that up
in the other thread.

I think variable length headers may be eventually supported through pattern
tricks or eventually a separate conversion layer.

A parse graph notion would support this naturally though without pattern
tricks hence my above suggestions.

Also in the current scheme how would I match an ipv6 option or specific
nsh option or mpls tag?

quoted

quoted

quoted

quoted

I looked at the git repo but I only saw the header definition I guess
the implementation is TBD after there is enough agreement on the
interface?

Precisely, I intend to update the tree and send a v2 soon (unfortunately did
not have much time these past few days to work on this).

Now what if, instead of a seemingly complex parse graph and still in
addition to the query method, enum values were defined for PMDs to report
an array of supported items, typical patterns and actions so applications
can get a quick idea of what devices are capable of without being too
specific. Something like:

 enum rte_flow_capability {
     RTE_FLOW_CAPABILITY_ITEM_ETH,
     RTE_FLOW_CAPABILITY_PATTERN_ETH_IP_TCP,
     RTE_FLOW_CAPABILITY_ACTION_ID,
     ...
 };

Although I'm not convinced about the usefulness of this because it would
have to be maintained separately, but that would be easier than building a
dummy flow rule for simple query purposes.

I'm not sure its necessary either at first.

Then I'll discard this idea.

quoted

quoted

The main question I have for you is, do you think the core of the specified
API is adequate enough assuming it can be extended later with new methods?

The above two items are my only opens at this point, I agree with your
summary of my capabilities proposal namely it can be added.

Thanks, see you in the other thread.

Thanks,
John