This patchset adds a netlink api to refresh an existing flow in openvswitch.
When a packet is sent in the openvswitch kernel datapath and no flow is found, the packet is sent to the ovs-vswitchd daemon, which will process the packet, and ask the kernel to create a new flow. The next packets for this flow will be processed by the kernel datapath. If a flow is not used for a (configurable) period of time, ovs-vswitchd removes the flow from the kernel. As a result, it can be tricky to test the kernel datapath against packets, as the first packets of each flow will have to go through the ovs-vswitchd daemon. For instance, to do a zeroloss performance test, you establish the flows, and then you have to perform your zeroloss test before the flow is removed by ovs-vswitchd. It is possible to configure a flow timeout in ovs-vswitchd (using other_config:max-idle option), but it changes the behavior for all the flows, which is not always what you want. I tested this with a patch for the openvswitch tree of the ovs-dpctl mod-flow command, which adds a --refresh flag. I will submit the patch if this patchset is accepted. Samuel Gauthier (2): ovs: split ovs_flow_stats_update into skb and stats ovs: support to refresh a flow via netlink net/openvswitch/datapath.c | 4 +++- net/openvswitch/flow.c | 23 ++++++++++++++++++----- net/openvswitch/flow.h | 5 +++-- 3 files changed, 24 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-) -- 2.2.1.62.g3f15098
