Hi all,
I think that Rx/Tx offloads checks behaviour is inconsistent in next-net
as of today.
Consistency checks are removed from PMDs and substituted with error logs
in ethdev.
Basically application which is not switched to new offload API has no
way to find out if,
for example, Rx scatter is supported. Rx scatter offload was introduced
in 17.11 to
substitute corresponding flag in device Rx mode.
Not updated application could try to enable Rx scatter on device
configure and
get failure if it is not supported. Yes it is not fine-grained and it
could be numerous
reasons behind the configure failure. With 18.05 configure will pass and
moreover
hardware may be configured to do Rx scatter despite of no real support
in PMD.
Consequences could be really different from simply dropping scattered
packet or
delivery of truncated packets to spoiling of memory etc.
Similar could happen with multi-segment packet on Tx. Application configures
Tx queue without NOMULTISEG flag, TxQ setup passes (with error log that
multi-segment is not supported, but it is just an error log) and
application generates
multi-segment packets which are simply truncated (if the first segment
length is used
as packet length on transmit) or garbage is sent (if total packet length
is used, i.e.
possible disclosure of security sensitive information since it could be
data from
neighbour packet).
I think we have the following options:
A. Rollback corresponding changes which remove checks from PMDs
(at least some PMDs will be not affected).
B. Fail configure if unsupported offload is requested (all PMDs must be
converted
in the release, so reporting of supported offloads must be correct) AND
add check that offloads requested on Tx queue level (derived from
txq_flags)
are supported at least somewhere (i.e. tx_offload_capa)
C. Describe the behaviour changes in release notes to try to make it at
least
create for DPDK users. I don't like the option at all.
Any other ideas?
I would vote for B since it is a step forward and even if it makes some apps
to fail I think it is better than consequences of missing checks.
I'll make a patch for option B and test it meanwhile.
Andrew
