On 16.10.24 17:59, Eric Woudstra wrote:

On 10/15/24 9:44 PM, Felix Fietkau wrote:

quoted

On 15.10.24 15:32, Eric Woudstra wrote:

quoted

On 10/15/24 2:16 PM, Felix Fietkau wrote:

quoted

Hi Eric,

On 14.10.24 20:29, Eric Woudstra wrote:

quoted

It would be no problem for me to change the subject and body, if you
think that is better.

The thing is, these patches actually make it possible to set up a fully
functional software fastpath between bridged interfaces. Only after the
software fastpath is set up and functional, it can be offloaded, which
happens to by my personal motivation to write this patch-set.

If the offload flag is set in the flowtable, the software fastpath will
be offloaded. But in this patch-set, there is nothing that changes
anything there, the existing code is used unchanged.

FWIW, a while back, I also wanted to add a software fast path for the
bridge layer to the kernel, also with the intention of using it for
hardware offload. It wasn't accepted back then, because (if I remember
correctly) people didn't want any extra complexity in the network stack
to make the bridge layer faster.

Hello Felix,

I think this patch-set is a clear showcase it is not very complex at
all. The core of making it possible only consists a few patches. Half of
this patch-set involves improvements that also apply to the
forward-fastpath.

It's definitely an interesting approach. How does it deal with devices
roaming from one bridge port to another? I couldn't find that in the code.

It is handled in the same manner when dealing with the forward-fastpath,
with the aid of conntrack. If roaming is problematic, then it would be
for both the forward-fastpath and the bridge-fastpath. I have a topic on
the banana-pi forum about this patch-set, so I think long discussions
about additional details we could have there, keeping the mailing list
more clean.

You forgot to include a link to the forum topic :)

By the way, based on some reports that I received, I do believe that the 
existing forwarding fastpath also doesn't handle roaming properly.
I just didn't have the time to properly look into that yet.

- Felix