Re: [ovs-dev] [PATCH net-next v6 05/10] net: openvswitch: optimize flow-mask looking up

On Sat, Nov 2, 2019 at 11:50 PM Pravin Shelar [off-list ref] wrote:

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

quoted

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>

Nack to this patch.

It makes the mask cache invalid when moving the flow mask
to fill another hole.
And the penalty for miss the mask cache is larger than the
benefit of this patch (avoiding the NULL flow-mask).

William