On 09/23/14 at 12:11am, Andy Gospodarek wrote: > There are clearly some that are most interested in how an eSwitch on an > SR-IOV capable NIC be controlled can provide traditional forwarding help > as well as offload the various technologies they hope to terminate > at/inside their endpoint (host/guest/container) -- Thomas's _simple_ > use-case demonstrates this. ;) This is a logical extention/increase in > functionality that is offered in many eSwitches that was previously > hidden from the user with the first generation SR-IOV capable network > devices on hosts/servers.
I think we can define this more broadly and state that providing RX steering capabilities to identify a guest in the NIC allows to directly map packets into a memory region shared between host and guest. Not a new concept at all but the existing dMAC and VLAN rx filtering is just too limiting. We require a programmable API with support for encap and encryption. SR-IOV is a hardware assisted form of that which can expedite the guest to guest path on a host. _______________________________________________ dev mailing list dev@openvswitch.org http://openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
