Re: [patch net-next RFC 10/12] openvswitch: add support for datapath hardware offload

On 08/26/14 at 11:54am, Andy Gospodarek wrote:

It is easy to *say* it could be added later, but connecting to software
forwarding in the kernel outside of OVS (which is important to some)
would take significant effort since this set only connects switch
hardware to OVS.

Can you explain why that effort is more significant if a flow API
added first? I'm not saying it is easy to offload the existing
forwarding path, otherwise it would have been done already, but
I don't understand how the proposal makes this any more difficult.

It may be that all software-based forwarding is done via OVS in the
future, but it feels like we are long way from that future for those
that do not want to use an external controller.

Wait... I don't want to use OpenFlow to configure my laptop ;-)

We should leave the controller out of this discussion though. A
controller is not required to run OVS at all. OpenStack Neutron
is a very good example for that. There are even applications which
use the OVS kernel datapath but not the OVS user space portion.
We have a wide set of APIs serving different purposes and need to
account for all of them. I'm as much interested in an offloaded
nftables and tc command as you.