[dpdk-dev] [RFC] Generic flow director/filtering/classification API

[John Fastabend]

On 16-07-21 12:20 PM, Adrien Mazarguil wrote:
> Hi Jerin,
> 
> Sorry, looks like I missed your reply. Please see below.
> 

Hi Adrian,

Sorry for a bit delay but a few comments that may be worth considering.

To start with completely agree on the general problem statement and the
nice summary of all the current models. Also good start on this.

> 
> Considering that allowed pattern/actions combinations cannot be known in
> advance and would result in an unpractically large number of capabilities to
> expose, a method is provided to validate a given rule from the current
> device configuration state without actually adding it (akin to a "dry run"
> mode).

Rather than have a query/validate process why did we jump over having an
intermediate representation of the capabilities? Here you state it is
unpractical but we know how to represent parse graphs and the drivers
could report their supported parse graph via a single query to a middle
layer.

This will actually reduce the msg chatter imagine many applications at
init time or in boundary cases where a large set of applications come
online at once and start banging on the interface all at once seems less
than ideal.

Worse in my opinion it requires all drivers to write mostly duplicating
validation code where a common layer could easily do this if every
driver reported a common data structure representing its parse graph
instead. The nice fallout of this initial effort upfront is the driver
no longer needs to do error handling/checking/etc and can assume all
rules are correct and valid. It makes driver code much simpler to
support. And IMO at least by doing this we get some other nice benefits
described below.

Another related question is about performance.

> Creation
> ~~~~~~~~
> 
> Creating a flow rule is similar to validating one, except the rule is
> actually created.
> 
> ::
> 
>  struct rte_flow *
>  rte_flow_create(uint8_t port_id,
>                  const struct rte_flow_pattern *pattern,
>                  const struct rte_flow_actions *actions);

I gather this implies that each driver must parse the pattern/action
block and map this onto the hardware. How many rules per second can this
support? I've run into systems that expect a level of service somewhere
around 50k cmds per second. So bulking will help at the message level
but it seems like a lot of overhead to unpack the pattern/action section.

One strategy I've used in other systems that worked relatively well
is if the query for the parse graph above returns a key for each node
in the graph then a single lookup can map the key to a node. Its
unambiguous and then these operations simply become a table lookup.
So to be a bit more concrete this changes the pattern structure in
rte_flow_create() into a  <key,value,mask> tuple where the key is known
by the initial parse graph query. If you reserve a set of well-defined
key values for well known protocols like ethernet, ip, etc. then the
query model also works but the middle layer catches errors in this case
and again the driver only gets known good flows. So something like this,

  struct rte_flow_pattern {
	uint32_t priority;
	uint32_t key;
	uint32_t value_length;
	u8 *value;
  }

Also if we have multiple tables what do you think about adding a
table_id to the signature. Probably not needed in the first generation
but is likely useful for hardware with multiple tables so that it
would be,

   rte_flow_create(uint8_t port_id, uint8_t table_id, ...);

Finally one other problem we've had which would be great to address
if we are doing a rewrite of the API is adding new protocols to
already deployed DPDK stacks. This is mostly a Linux distribution
problem where you can't easily update DPDK.

In the prototype header linked in this document it seems to add new
headers requires adding a new enum in the rte_flow_item_type but there
is at least an attempt at a catch all here,

> 	/**
> 	 * Matches a string of a given length at a given offset (in bytes),
> 	 * or anywhere in the payload of the current protocol layer
> 	 * (including L2 header if used as the first item in the stack).
> 	 *
> 	 * See struct rte_flow_item_raw.
> 	 */
> 	RTE_FLOW_ITEM_TYPE_RAW,

Actually this is a nice implementation because it works after the
previous item in the stack correct? So you can put it after "known"
variable length headers like IP. The limitation is it can't get past
undefined variable length headers. However if you use the above parse
graph reporting from the driver mechanism and the driver always reports
its largest supported graph then we don't have this issue where a new
hardware sku/ucode/etc added support for new headers but we have no
way to deploy it to existing software users without recompiling and
redeploying.

I looked at the git repo but I only saw the header definition I guess
the implementation is TBD after there is enough agreement on the
interface?

Thanks,
John