Re: Open vSwitch Design

On Fri, 2011-11-25 at 12:20 -0800, Jesse Gross wrote:

The flow classifier isn't really designed to do rule lookup in the way
that OpenFlow/Open vSwitch does, since it's more about choosing which
fields are considered significant to the flow.  I'm sure that it could
be extended in some way but it seems that the better approach would be
to factor out the common pieces (such as the header extraction
mentioned before) than try to cram both models into one component.

Yes, it would need a tweak or two.
But u32 would. And the action subsystem does.

I understand that you see some commonalities with various parts of the
system but often there are enough conceptual differences that you end
up trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. 

I have done this for years. I have very good knowledge of merchant
sillicom and i have programmed them on Linux; i know this space a lot
more than you are assuming.
If you can point me to _one_, just _one_ thing, that you do in the
classifier action piece that cannot be done in Linux today and is
more flexible in your setup than it is on Linux we can have a
useful discussion.

 As Stephen
mentioned about the bridge, many of these components are already
fairly complex and combining more functionality into them isn't always
a win.

I think the bridge started on a bad foot for not properly integrating
with Vlans and tightly integrating STP control in the kernel.

cheers,
jamal