On Fri, Nov 1, 2019 at 7:24 AM [off-list ref] wrote:

From: Tonghao Zhang <redacted>

The full looking up on flow table traverses all mask array.
If mask-array is too large, the number of invalid flow-mask
increase, performance will be drop.

One bad case, for example: M means flow-mask is valid and NULL
of flow-mask means deleted.

+-------------------------------------------+
| M | NULL | ...                  | NULL | M|
+-------------------------------------------+

In that case, without this patch, openvswitch will traverses all
mask array, because there will be one flow-mask in the tail. This
patch changes the way of flow-mask inserting and deleting, and the
mask array will be keep as below: there is not a NULL hole. In the
fast path, we can "break" "for" (not "continue") in flow_lookup
when we get a NULL flow-mask.

         "break"
            v
+-------------------------------------------+
| M | M |  NULL |...           | NULL | NULL|
+-------------------------------------------+

This patch don't optimize slow or control path, still using ma->max
to traverse. Slow path:
* tbl_mask_array_realloc
* ovs_flow_tbl_lookup_exact
* flow_mask_find

Signed-off-by: Tonghao Zhang <redacted>
Tested-by: Greg Rose <redacted>
---

Acked-by: Pravin B Shelar <redacted>