From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Rick Jones Subject: Re: RFC: ethtool support for n-tuple filter programming Date: Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:28:31 -0800 Message-ID: <4AF6029F.6020403@hp.com> References: <1257533841.2610.12.camel@ppwaskie-mobl2> <469958e00911061112y4d2d746cq93d90abfd6df7ec1@mail.gmail.com> <1257535875.2610.15.camel@ppwaskie-mobl2> <20091107144938.82957125.billfink@mindspring.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Peter P Waskiewicz Jr , Caitlin Bestler , "netdev@vger.kernel.org" To: Bill Fink Return-path: Received: from g6t0185.atlanta.hp.com ([15.193.32.62]:12786 "EHLO g6t0185.atlanta.hp.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753652AbZKGX23 (ORCPT ); Sat, 7 Nov 2009 18:28:29 -0500 In-Reply-To: <20091107144938.82957125.billfink@mindspring.com> Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Bill Fink wrote: > On Fri, 06 Nov 2009, Peter P Waskiewicz Jr wrote: > > >>On Fri, 2009-11-06 at 11:12 -0800, Caitlin Bestler wrote: >> >>>The approach you are proposing assumes what type of packet filters >>>that L2 hardware could support. >>> >>>Why not simply use existing filtering rules that overshoot the target, >>>such as netfilter, and ask the >>>device specific tool to indicate what set of these rules it can support? >> >>Are you proposing that netfilter is modified to pass the filters down to >>the hardware if it supports it? netfilter doesn't steer flows though to >>queues (or flow ID's in the kernel), plus that's putting HW-specific >>capabilities into netfilter. I'm not sure we want to do that. >> >>Please correct me if I'm wrong with interpreting your suggestion. > > > Plus I believe using netfilter has a significant performance penalty, > and it would be desirable to use such a feature without incurring > this penalty when there was otherwise no need to use netfilter. At the risk of typing words into someone's keyboard, I interpreted it as suggesting using the filtering language of netfilter or something similar, not necessarily netfilter itself? rick jones