Re: [net-next-2.6 PATCH 0/3 RFC] macvlan: MAC Address filtering support for passthru mode

On 9/8/2011 8:00 PM, Roopa Prabhu wrote:

On 9/8/11 12:33 PM, "Michael S. Tsirkin"[off-list ref]  wrote:

quoted

On Thu, Sep 08, 2011 at 12:23:56PM -0700, Roopa Prabhu wrote:

quoted

quoted

I think the main usecase for passthru mode is to assign a SR-IOV VF to
a single guest.

Yes and for the passthru usecase this patch should be enough to enable
filtering in hw (eventually like I indicated before I need to fix vlan
filtering too).

So with filtering in hw, and in sriov VF case, VFs
actually share a filtering table. How will that
be partitioned?

AFAIK, though it might maintain a single filter table space in hw, hw does
know which filter belongs to which VF. And the OS driver does not need to do
anything special. The VF driver exposes a VF netdev. And any uc/mc addresses
registered with a VF netdev are registered with the hw by the driver. And hw
will filter and send only pkts that the VF has expressed interest in.

Does your NIC & driver support adding multiple mac addresses to a VF?
I have tried a few other SR-IOV NICs sometime back and they didn't support this feature.

Currently, we don't have an interface to add multiple mac addresses to a netdev other than an
indirect way of creating a macvlan /if on top of it.

Thanks
Sridhar

No special filter partitioning in hw is required.

Thanks,
Roopa