• Vladimir Oltean's avatar
    net: dsa: felix: Allow unknown unicast traffic towards the CPU port module · 1cf3299b
    Vladimir Oltean authored
    Compared to other DSA switches, in the Ocelot cores, the RX filtering is
    a much more important concern.
    
    Firstly, the primary use case for Ocelot is non-DSA, so there isn't any
    secondary Ethernet MAC [the DSA master's one] to implicitly drop frames
    having a DMAC we are not interested in.  So the switch driver itself
    needs to install FDB entries towards the CPU port module (PGID_CPU) for
    the MAC address of each switch port, in each VLAN installed on the port.
    Every address that is not whitelisted is implicitly dropped. This is in
    order to achieve a behavior similar to N standalone net devices.
    
    Secondly, even in the secondary use case of DSA, such as illustrated by
    Felix with the NPI port mode, that secondary Ethernet MAC is present,
    but its RX filter is bypassed. This is because the DSA tags themselves
    are placed before Ethernet, so the DMAC that the switch ports see is
    not seen by the DSA master too (since it's shifter to the right).
    
    So RX filtering is pretty important. A good RX filter won't bother the
    CPU in case the switch port receives a frame that it's not interested
    in, and there exists no other line of defense.
    
    Ocelot is pretty strict when it comes to RX filtering: non-IP multicast
    and broadcast traffic is allowed to go to the CPU port module, but
    unknown unicast isn't. This means that traffic reception for any other
    MAC addresses than the ones configured on each switch port net device
    won't work. This includes use cases such as macvlan or bridging with a
    non-Ocelot (so-called "foreign") interface. But this seems to be fine
    for the scenarios that the Linux system embedded inside an Ocelot switch
    is intended for - it is simply not interested in unknown unicast
    traffic, as explained in Allan Nielsen's presentation [0].
    
    On the other hand, the Felix DSA switch is integrated in more
    general-purpose Linux systems, so it can't afford to drop that sort of
    traffic in hardware, even if it will end up doing so later, in software.
    
    Actually, unknown unicast means more for Felix than it does for Ocelot.
    Felix doesn't attempt to perform the whitelisting of switch port MAC
    addresses towards PGID_CPU at all, mainly because it is too complicated
    to be feasible: while the MAC addresses are unique in Ocelot, by default
    in DSA all ports are equal and inherited from the DSA master. This adds
    into account the question of reference counting MAC addresses (delayed
    ocelot_mact_forget), not to mention reference counting for the VLAN IDs
    that those MAC addresses are installed in. This reference counting
    should be done in the DSA core, and the fact that it wasn't needed so
    far is due to the fact that the other DSA switches don't have the DSA
    tag placed before Ethernet, so the DSA master is able to whitelist the
    MAC addresses in hardware.
    
    So this means that even regular traffic termination on a Felix switch
    port happens through flooding (because neither Felix nor Ocelot learn
    source MAC addresses from CPU-injected frames).
    
    So far we've explained that whitelisting towards PGID_CPU:
    - helps to reduce the likelihood of spamming the CPU with frames it
      won't process very far anyway
    - is implemented in the ocelot driver
    - is sufficient for the ocelot use cases
    - is not feasible in DSA
    - breaks use cases in DSA, in the current status (whitelisting enabled
      but no MAC address whitelisted)
    
    So the proposed patch allows unknown unicast frames to be sent to the
    CPU port module. This is done for the Felix DSA driver only, as Ocelot
    seems to be happy without it.
    
    [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1HhxEcU7JgSuggested-by: default avatarAllan W. Nielsen <allan.nielsen@microchip.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarVladimir Oltean <vladimir.oltean@nxp.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarAllan W. Nielsen <allan.nielsen@microchip.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
    1cf3299b
felix.c 20.7 KB