Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 09:12:29PM CET, davem@davemloft.net wrote:

From: Pablo Neira Ayuso <pablo@netfilter.org>
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2018 01:15:07 +0100

quoted

This patchset introduces a kernel intermediate representation (IR) to
express ACL hardware offloads, as already described in previous RFC and
v1 patchset [1] [2]. The idea is to normalize the frontend U/APIs to use
the flow dissectors and the flow actions so drivers can reuse the
existing TC offload driver codebase - that has been converted to use the
flow_rule infrastructure.

I'm go to bring up the elephant in the room.

I think the real motivation here is to offload netfilter rules to HW,
and you should be completely honest about that.

Sure, but this patchset is mainly about making the parsing code in
drivers common no matter from where the "flow rule" comes. If later on
the netfilter code will use it, through another ndo/notifier/whatever,
that is side a nice side-effect in my opinion.