Re: [PATCH net-next 0/3] net/sched: act_ct: Add support for specifying tuple offload policy

[Edward Cree <ecree@solarflare.com>]

On 18/05/2020 18:25, Jiri Pirko wrote:
> Is it worth to have an object just for this particular purpose? In the
> past I was trying to push a tc block object that could be added/removed
> and being used to insert filters w/o being attached to any qdisc. This
> was frowned upon and refused because the existence of block does not
> have any meaning w/o being attached.
A tc action doesn't have any meaning either until it is attached to a
 filter.  Is the consensus that the 'tc action' API/command set was a
 mistake, or am I misunderstanding the objection?

> What you suggest with zone sounds quite similar. More to that, it is
> related only to act_ct. Is it a good idea to have a common object in TC
> which is actually used as internal part of act_ct only?
Well, really it's related as much to flower ct_stateas to act_ct: the
 policy numbers control when a conntrack rule (from the zone) gets
 offloaded into drivers, thus determining whether a packet (which has
 been through an act_ct to make it +trk) is ±est.
It's because it has a scope broader than a single ct action that I'm
 resistant to hanging it off act_ct in this way.

Also it still somewhat bothers me that this policy isn't scoped to the
 device; I realise that the current implementation of a single flow
 table shared by all offloading devices is what forces that, but it
 just doesn't seem semantically right that the policy on when to
 offload a connection is global across devices with potentially
 differing capabilities (e.g. size of their conntrack tables) that
 might want different policies.
(And a 'tc ct add dev eth0 zone 1 policy_blah...' would conveniently
 give a hook point for callback (1) from my offtopic ramble, that the
 driver could use to register for connections in the zone and start
 offloading them to hardware, rather than doing it the first time it
 sees that zone show up in an act_ct it's offloading.  You don't
 really want to do the same in the non-device-qualified case because
 that could use up HW table space for connections in a zone you're
 not offloading any rules for.)

Basically I'm just dreaming of a world where TC does a lot more with
 explicit objects that it creates and then references, rather than
 drivers having to implicitly create HW objects for things the first
 time a rule tries to reference them.
"Is it worth" all these extra objects?  Really that depends on how
 much simpler the drivers can become as a result; this is the control
 path, so programmer time is worth more than machine time, and space
 in the programmer's head is worth more than machine RAM ;-)

-ed