[OpenWrt-Devel] General questions about the direction of switch drivers

Michael Richardson mcr at sandelman.ca
Tue Feb 17 09:54:02 EST 2015


Joel Wirāmu Pauling <joel at aenertia.net> wrote:
    > I for one would love to see brctl and vconfig disappear completely in
    > favour of ovs-* based standard toolchain for all switch interaction.

When I say, "brctl/vconfig", I really mean that I want the kernel API to be
the same as for a "hardware" switch, and really so does everyone else.  I am
a little less concerned about whether the hardware underneath is under the
kernel, or beside the kernel, as long as it speaks the same API.
The IETF FORCES (basically, netlink over IP) model is the most model to me.

Having the hardware underneath would also be cool.

    > I guess the biggest issue is getting ovs- offload to switch chipsets
    > rather than CPU bound softswitch. Maybe some sort of flag where
    > unsupported operations/modes which would end up being done on the CPU
    > are flagged/masked?

That's what it winds up meaning having the hardware under the kernel, rather
than next to the kernel.

--
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        | network architect  [
]     mcr at sandelman.ca  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [
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