Re: [RFC PATCH 3/4] net: VSI: Add virtual station interface support

On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 10:30:29AM -0700, John Fastabend wrote:

On 9/20/2013 4:12 PM, Neil Horman wrote:

quoted

John-
     Sorry for not copying your orgional patch into your email, but I apparently
erased this email prior to fully reading it.  At any rate, as we discussed the
other day, I think this idea is great, but it would benefit from being
implemented using macvlans rather than a new link type.  If we can set a
hardware flag in the underlying driver to indicate support for hardware
forwarding, we can skip the macvlan soft forwarding, and just transmit directly.
It should save us needing to create a whole new link type that is so simmilar to
one we already have.

     I'm back home now, so I can start looking at this if you like on monday.

Best
Neil

Yes definitely take a look making it an extension (flag) to macvlan
would be more useful if it can work. The one question I have is would
we need to clear the flag when a feature is attached to the PF that can
not be done in hardware. For example attaching an ingress qdisc,
ebtables, or starting up tcpdump are two that come to mind.

I think that it probably would, although I expect that this would be the case
independent of the implementations (virtual station interfaces vs. macvlans).
The only other option I see is to disallow those features that can't be done in
hardware, but I think thats unworkable long term.

Neil

.John

Sorry for the duplication Neil, I sent this mail from a broken email
client just a minute ago and vger dropped it.
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