On 3/1/2012 5:36 AM, Jamal Hadi Salim wrote:

On Wed, 2012-02-29 at 10:19 -0800, John Fastabend wrote:

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I want to see a unified API so that user space control applications (RSTP, TRILL?)
can use one set of netlink calls for both software bridge and hardware offloaded
bridges.  Does this proposal meet that requirement?

I dont see any issues with those requirements being met.

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Jamal, so why do "They have to be different calls"? I'm not so sure anymore...
moving to RTM_FDB_XXXENTRY saved some refactoring in the bridge module but that
is just cosmetic.

I may not want to use the s/ware bridge i.e I may want to use h/ware
bridge. I may want to use both. So there are 3 variations there. You
need at least 1.5 bits to represent them if you are going to use the
same interface. There may be features in either h/ware but not in
s/ware and vice-versa. 
A single interface with flags which say this applies to hware:sware:both
would be good, but it may be harder to achieve - thats why i suggested
they be different.

cheers,
jamal

Hmm so I think what I'll do is this...

 both: ndm_flags = 0 
 sw  : ndm_flags = NTF_SW_FDB
 hw  : ndm_flags = NTF_HW_FDB

Then current tools will work with embedded bridges and software bridges
with the interesting case being when a port supporting an offloaded FDB
is attached to a SW bridge. Doing both in this case seems to be a reasonable
default to me.

The tricky bit will be pulling the message handlers out of the ./net/bridge
code so that we don't have to always load the bridge module to add entries
to a macvlan for example. I need to look at a few other things today but
I'll code up a patch for this tomorrow.

.John