Previously, flows were manipulated by userspace specifying a full,
unmasked flow key. This adds significant burden onto flow
serialization/deserialization, particularly when dumping flows.
This patch adds an alternative way to refer to flows using a
variable-length "unique flow identifier" (UFID). At flow setup time,
userspace may specify a UFID for a flow, which is stored with the flow
and inserted into a separate table for lookup, in addition to the
standard flow table. Flows created using a UFID must be fetched or
deleted using the UFID.
All flow dump operations may now be made more terse with OVS_UFID_F_*
flags. For example, the OVS_UFID_F_OMIT_KEY flag allows responses to
omit the flow key from a datapath operation if the flow has a
corresponding UFID. This significantly reduces the time spent assembling
and transacting netlink messages. With all OVS_UFID_F_OMIT_* flags
enabled, the datapath only returns the UFID and statistics for each flow
during flow dump, increasing ovs-vswitchd revalidator performance by 40%
or more.
Signed-off-by: Joe Stringer <joestringer@nicira.com>
Acked-by: Pravin B Shelar <pshelar@nicira.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Add wildcarded flow support in kernel datapath.
Wildcarded flow can improve OVS flow set up performance by avoid sending
matching new flows to the user space program. The exact performance boost
will largely dependent on wildcarded flow hit rate.
In case all new flows hits wildcard flows, the flow set up rate is
within 5% of that of linux bridge module.
Pravin has made significant contributions to this patch. Including API
clean ups and bug fixes.
Signed-off-by: Pravin B Shelar <pshelar@nicira.com>
Signed-off-by: Andy Zhou <azhou@nicira.com>
Signed-off-by: Jesse Gross <jesse@nicira.com>
Open vSwitch is a multilayer Ethernet switch targeted at virtualized
environments. In addition to supporting a variety of features
expected in a traditional hardware switch, it enables fine-grained
programmatic extension and flow-based control of the network.
This control is useful in a wide variety of applications but is
particularly important in multi-server virtualization deployments,
which are often characterized by highly dynamic endpoints and the need
to maintain logical abstractions for multiple tenants.
The Open vSwitch datapath provides an in-kernel fast path for packet
forwarding. It is complemented by a userspace daemon, ovs-vswitchd,
which is able to accept configuration from a variety of sources and
translate it into packet processing rules.
See http://openvswitch.org for more information and userspace
utilities.
Signed-off-by: Jesse Gross <jesse@nicira.com>
