Re: [net-next PATCH 01/15] net: Combine GENEVE and VXLAN port offload notifiers into single functions
From: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Date: 2016-06-15 07:22:07
Also in:
intel-wired-lan
From: Alexander Duyck <redacted> Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2016 19:50:02 -0700
I'm not going to speculate on what Dave's opinion on this is. I'll wait to hear it from him. My concern at this point is that we have several issues. Specifically we have VXLAN-GPE trying to pass itself off as VXLAN when it clearly is not, and I know we are going to end up with somebody eventually trying to push this feature into the kernel. I know for a fact there is hardware out there that already supports it. I'm trying to get ahead of this and define what the interface is supposed to look like myself so that we don't end up with somebody unfamiliar with all this trying to push it. This way we can avoid having some hardware vendor on a timeline trying to push it through quick as in the case of i40e, or somebody trying to get around it by just hard coding it into their driver like occurred with bnxt. While I appreciate the opinion, outright refusing to enable the existing offloads is counterproductive. There are customers out there that already have this hardware. There are driver writers out there who are going to have to enable these features one way or another. If we want to be obstructionists then I am sure they can just work around us and write up out-of-tree drivers and use something like module parameters to enable offloads on a specific port. Most of these implementations only seem to support one port anyway. I just thought it might be better to have this figured out in the kernel so that we didn't end up creating a bigger mess than needed with each vendor going off and doing their own out-of-tree implementation.
My plan is to try and properly balance the two side of this situation. Realistically, and Alex is right on this, we shoot ourselves in the foot by not supporting offloads that exist in hardware now even if they are not generic. So I would encourage Alex to keep working on his patch set and to keep working on the feedback he is given. Thanks.