In the initial implementation the only way to stop a rule from being
inserted into the hardware table was via the device feature flag.
However this doesn't work well when working on an end host system
where packets are expect to hit both the hardware and software
datapaths.
For example we can imagine a rule that will match an IP address and
increment a field. If we install this rule in both hardware and
software we may increment the field twice. To date we have only
added support for the drop action so we have been able to ignore
these cases. But as we extend the action support we will hit this
example plus more such cases. Arguably these are not even corner
cases in many working systems these cases will be common.
To avoid forcing the driver to always abort (i.e. the above example)
this patch adds a flag to add a rule in software only. A careful
user can use this flag to build software and hardware datapaths
that work together. One example we have found particularly useful
is to use hardware resources to set the skb->mark on the skb when
the match may be expensive to run in software but a mark lookup
in a hash table is cheap. The idea here is hardware can do in one
lookup what the u32 classifier may need to traverse multiple lists
and hash tables to compute. The flag is only passed down on inserts.
On deletion to avoid stale references in hardware we always try
to remove a rule if it exists.
The flags field is part of the classifier specific options. Although
it is tempting to lift this into the generic structure doing this
proves difficult do to how the tc netlink attributes are implemented
along with how the dump/change routines are called. There is also
precedence for putting seemingly generic pieces in the specific
classifier options such as TCA_U32_POLICE, TCA_U32_ACT, etc. So
although not ideal I've left FLAGS in the u32 options as well as it
simplifies the code greatly and user space has already learned how
to manage these bits ala 'tc' tool.
Another thing if trying to update a rule we require the flags to
be unchanged. This is to force user space, software u32 and
the hardware u32 to keep in sync. Thanks to Simon Horman for
catching this case.
Signed-off-by: John Fastabend <john.r.fastabend@intel.com>
Acked-by: Jiri Pirko <jiri@mellanox.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
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