PPE flowtable offload on ipq807x (was: packet steering and bidirectional forwarding on ipq807x)

[Robert Marko]

On Sun, 25 Oct 2026 at 11:18, John Macias <dencity7 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello Julius,
>
> Following up on the steering thread: with forwarding clean at 1 Gb/s,
> CPU0 (all RX) and CPU1 (TX completion) were still 92-95% and 55-97%
> busy, and software flow offload did not touch them. So I tried the
> PPE's L3 flow tables, and they work on this v1 silicon. As Robert asked
> for OpenWrt patches to go through GitHub, the patch is a draft pull
> request:
>
>   https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/26176
>
> I know v1 is an edge case for you, so the patch stays out of the way:
> nothing changes until a flowtable with "flags offload" binds, and
> unbinding puts the L3 tables back.
>
> Results on the RAX120 v1, iperf3 from a LAN client to a WAN host
> through NAT. CPU busy is CPU0/1/2/3 in percent, first with software
> forwarding, then with the patch:
>
> - UDP 900+900 Mb/s: 0.00% loss.
>   CPU 92/56/40/47 before, 1/3/2/1 after.
> - TCP both ways: 939+936 Mb/s (928+788 before).
>   CPU 92/93/50/57 before, 1/4/4/3 after.
> - 600 s with 16 TCP connections both ways: 928+936 Mb/s, CPU idle.
>
> The pull request has the rest of the results, and what I measured
> about the tables that qca-ssdk does not document. Questions, if you
> have time:
>
> 1. Is the EDMA hook acceptable? ndo_setup_tc only forwards TC_SETUP_FT
>    to ds->ops->port_setup_tc on the CPU port, so neither driver calls
>    the other directly.
> 2. Each user port gets the L3 interface of its own index through
>    L3_VP_PORT_TBL. The port mapping alone was enough here, so I left
>    your VSI allocation alone. Would you rather tie it to the VSIs?
> 3. Would you want this as a separate patch, or folded into the driver
>    series?
>
> Only tested on RAX120 v1 (IPQ8074 rev 1.2), not on later IPQ8074
> revisions or IPQ6018.
>
> This was written with an AI coding assistant (Claude, from Anthropic).
> It worked out the table semantics on my hardware, wrote the driver
> changes and this message, and ran the tests. I have reviewed the patch.

Isnt the existing PPE offloading work from Julius enough:
https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/24806

Regards,
Robert
>
> John