On 3/1/2012 5:36 AM, Jamal Hadi Salim wrote: > On Wed, 2012-02-29 at 10:19 -0800, John Fastabend wrote: > >>> >>> I want to see a unified API so that user space control applications (RSTP, TRILL?) >>> can use one set of netlink calls for both software bridge and hardware offloaded >>> bridges. Does this proposal meet that requirement? >>> > > I dont see any issues with those requirements being met. > >> Jamal, so why do "They have to be different calls"? I'm not so sure anymore... >> moving to RTM_FDB_XXXENTRY saved some refactoring in the bridge module but that >> is just cosmetic. > > I may not want to use the s/ware bridge i.e I may want to use h/ware > bridge. I may want to use both. So there are 3 variations there. You > need at least 1.5 bits to represent them if you are going to use the > same interface. There may be features in either h/ware but not in > s/ware and vice-versa. > A single interface with flags which say this applies to hware:sware:both > would be good, but it may be harder to achieve - thats why i suggested > they be different. > > cheers, > jamal > Hmm so I think what I'll do is this... both: ndm_flags = 0 sw : ndm_flags = NTF_SW_FDB hw : ndm_flags = NTF_HW_FDB Then current tools will work with embedded bridges and software bridges with the interesting case being when a port supporting an offloaded FDB is attached to a SW bridge. Doing both in this case seems to be a reasonable default to me. The tricky bit will be pulling the message handlers out of the ./net/bridge code so that we don't have to always load the bridge module to add entries to a macvlan for example. I need to look at a few other things today but I'll code up a patch for this tomorrow. .John -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
