[dpdk-dev] removing mbuf error flags

[Arnon Warshavsky]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 9:24 PM, Jay Rolette <rolette at infinite.io> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 1:16 PM, Don Provan <dprovan at bivio.net> wrote:
>
> > >From: Olivier Matz [mailto:olivier.matz at 6wind.com]
> > >Subject: [dpdk-dev] removing mbuf error flags
> > >
> > >My opinion is that invalid packets should not be given to the
> application
> > and only a statistic counter should be incremented.
> >
> > The idea of an application that handles bad packets is perfectly valid.
> > Most applications don't want to see them, of course, but, conceptually,
> > some applications would want to ask for bad packets because they are
> > specifically designed to handle various networking problems including
> those
> > that result in bad packets that the application can look at and report.
> > Furthermore, it makes technical sense for DPDK to support such
> applications.
> >
> > Having said that, I have no idea if that's why that field was added, and
> I
> > don’t myself care if DPDK provides that feature in the future. I just
> > thought I'd put the idea out there in case it makes any difference to
> you.
> > If it were me, I'd probably decide it isn't hurting anything and not
> bother
> > to remove it in case some day someone wants to implement that feature in
> > one driver or another.
> >
>
> Yep. Pretty much any networking security product needs to see malformed
> packets.
>
> Jay
>

+1 for letting the application see bad packets and decide what to do with
them.
We had some zero order insertion issues in the past where the ability to
let the application capture malformed/unexpected packets was very helpful.

/Arnon.