From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Pablo Neira Ayuso <pablo@netfilter.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next,v6 00/12] add flow_rule infrastructure
Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2018 16:39:19 +0100
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Cc: Jakub Kicinski <jakub.kicinski@netronome.com>,
        Linux Netdev List <netdev@vger.kernel.org>,
        David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>, thomas.lendacky@amd.com,
        Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@gmail.com>,
        Ariel Elior <ariel.elior@cavium.com>,
        Michael Chan <michael.chan@broadcom.com>, santosh@chelsio.com,
        madalin.bucur@nxp.com,
        "Zhuangyuzeng (Yisen)" <yisen.zhuang@huawei.com>,
        Salil Mehta <salil.mehta@huawei.com>,
        Jeff Kirsher <jeffrey.t.kirsher@intel.com>,
        Tariq Toukan <tariqt@mellanox.com>,
        Saeed Mahameed <saeedm@mellanox.com>,
        Jiri Pirko <jiri@mellanox.com>,
        Ido Schimmel <idosch@mellanox.com>, peppe.cavallaro@st.com,
        grygorii.strashko@ti.com, Andrew Lunn <andrew@lunn.ch>,
        Vivien Didelot <vivien.didelot@savoirfairelinux.com>,
        alexandre.torgue@st.com, joabreu@synopsys.c
To: Or Gerlitz <gerlitz.or@gmail.com>
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On Thu, Dec 20, 2018 at 03:51:00PM +0200, Or Gerlitz wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 20, 2018 at 2:35 PM Pablo Neira Ayuso <pablo@netfilter.org> wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 19, 2018 at 04:26:53PM -0800, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> 
> > > I'm confused, could you rephrase?  How does you work help such devices?
> > > How is tc not suitable for them?
> 
> > There are two HW offload usecases:
> >
> > #1 Policy resides in software, CPU host sees initial packets, based on
> >    policy, you place flows into hardware via nf_flow_table infrastructure.
> >    This usecase is fine in your NIC since you assume host CPU can cope
> >    with policy in software for these few initial packets of the flow.
> >    However, switches usually have a small CPU to run control plane
> >    software only. There we _cannot_ use this approach.
> >
> > #2 Policy resides in hardware. For the usecase of switches with small
> >    CPU, the ACL is deployed in hardware. We use the host CPU to run
> >    control plane configurations only.
> >
> > This patchset _is not_ related to #1, this patchset _is_ related to #2.
> 
> confused, isn't this patch set related to connection tracking offloads
> on modern NIC HWs?

This patchset is aiming to unify ethtool_rxnfc and tc/cls_flower
representation to simplify driver codebase, ie. have a single parser
to populate HW IR. My immediate future work is to reuse this new
infrastructure to explore #2 for netfilter.