Jesse,

I empathize with effort youve put in, i really do; youve
already created the messaging from user space to kernel
and dammit it works; however, i  dont agree with your reasoning. 
The classifier action code is _exactly_ the same infrastructure.
The user space API/messaging already exists. If there are actions
or a classifier missing - add it.
I wish i had the time to re-write the pieces i think need
changing. If the plan is to migrate to the current tc action
code, I will be fine with it - but you are not even suggesting
that.

I think i will punt this to DaveM to make the call.

cheers,
jamal

On Fri, 2011-12-02 at 15:30 -0800, Jesse Gross wrote:

I completely agree with the desire to share code where there's overlap
and it makes sense (I was actually just working on some refactoring to
increase code reuse before this).

I think one of the key things to focus on is the userspace/kernel
interface since we'll have much less opportunity to significantly
change that over time.  Getting both compatibility and performance is
something that we've worked on a fair amount and have arrived at a
solution that meets the needs of OVS (and probably only OVS) pretty
well.  I think it's a nice model but keeping that while refactoring on
top of the tc layer seems challenging to do cleanly because the flow
information is needed by both the flow lookup and userspace
communication.  Stringing that through generic code seems fairly
unappealing.

So I agree with you in principle and if you are right that things tend
to converge there should be more room for code reuse over time.  Right
now though I would just focus on the high level bits.