Commit 0f22ad45 authored by Florian Fainelli's avatar Florian Fainelli Committed by David S. Miller

Documentation: networking: switchdev: clarify device driver behavior

This patch provides details on the expected behavior of switchdev
enabled network devices when operating in a "stand alone" mode, as well
as when being bridge members. This clarifies a number of things that
recently came up during a bug fixing session on the b53 DSA switch
driver.
Signed-off-by: default avatarFlorian Fainelli <f.fainelli@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarVladimir Oltean <vladimir.oltean@nxp.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarAndrew Lunn <andrew@lunn.ch>
Reviewed-by: default avatarIdo Schimmel <idosch@nvidia.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
parent 6e9530f4
......@@ -385,3 +385,155 @@ The driver can monitor for updates to arp_tbl using the netevent notifier
NETEVENT_NEIGH_UPDATE. The device can be programmed with resolved nexthops
for the routes as arp_tbl updates. The driver implements ndo_neigh_destroy
to know when arp_tbl neighbor entries are purged from the port.
Device driver expected behavior
-------------------------------
Below is a set of defined behavior that switchdev enabled network devices must
adhere to.
Configuration-less state
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Upon driver bring up, the network devices must be fully operational, and the
backing driver must configure the network device such that it is possible to
send and receive traffic to this network device and it is properly separated
from other network devices/ports (e.g.: as is frequent with a switch ASIC). How
this is achieved is heavily hardware dependent, but a simple solution can be to
use per-port VLAN identifiers unless a better mechanism is available
(proprietary metadata for each network port for instance).
The network device must be capable of running a full IP protocol stack
including multicast, DHCP, IPv4/6, etc. If necessary, it should program the
appropriate filters for VLAN, multicast, unicast etc. The underlying device
driver must effectively be configured in a similar fashion to what it would do
when IGMP snooping is enabled for IP multicast over these switchdev network
devices and unsolicited multicast must be filtered as early as possible in
the hardware.
When configuring VLANs on top of the network device, all VLANs must be working,
irrespective of the state of other network devices (e.g.: other ports being part
of a VLAN-aware bridge doing ingress VID checking). See below for details.
If the device implements e.g.: VLAN filtering, putting the interface in
promiscuous mode should allow the reception of all VLAN tags (including those
not present in the filter(s)).
Bridged switch ports
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
When a switchdev enabled network device is added as a bridge member, it should
not disrupt any functionality of non-bridged network devices and they
should continue to behave as normal network devices. Depending on the bridge
configuration knobs below, the expected behavior is documented.
Bridge VLAN filtering
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The Linux bridge allows the configuration of a VLAN filtering mode (statically,
at device creation time, and dynamically, during run time) which must be
observed by the underlying switchdev network device/hardware:
- with VLAN filtering turned off: the bridge is strictly VLAN unaware and its
data path will process all Ethernet frames as if they are VLAN-untagged.
The bridge VLAN database can still be modified, but the modifications should
have no effect while VLAN filtering is turned off. Frames ingressing the
device with a VID that is not programmed into the bridge/switch's VLAN table
must be forwarded and may be processed using a VLAN device (see below).
- with VLAN filtering turned on: the bridge is VLAN-aware and frames ingressing
the device with a VID that is not programmed into the bridges/switch's VLAN
table must be dropped (strict VID checking).
When there is a VLAN device (e.g: sw0p1.100) configured on top of a switchdev
network device which is a bridge port member, the behavior of the software
network stack must be preserved, or the configuration must be refused if that
is not possible.
- with VLAN filtering turned off, the bridge will process all ingress traffic
for the port, except for the traffic tagged with a VLAN ID destined for a
VLAN upper. The VLAN upper interface (which consumes the VLAN tag) can even
be added to a second bridge, which includes other switch ports or software
interfaces. Some approaches to ensure that the forwarding domain for traffic
belonging to the VLAN upper interfaces are managed properly:
* If forwarding destinations can be managed per VLAN, the hardware could be
configured to map all traffic, except the packets tagged with a VID
belonging to a VLAN upper interface, to an internal VID corresponding to
untagged packets. This internal VID spans all ports of the VLAN-unaware
bridge. The VID corresponding to the VLAN upper interface spans the
physical port of that VLAN interface, as well as the other ports that
might be bridged with it.
* Treat bridge ports with VLAN upper interfaces as standalone, and let
forwarding be handled in the software data path.
- with VLAN filtering turned on, these VLAN devices can be created as long as
the bridge does not have an existing VLAN entry with the same VID on any
bridge port. These VLAN devices cannot be enslaved into the bridge since they
duplicate functionality/use case with the bridge's VLAN data path processing.
Non-bridged network ports of the same switch fabric must not be disturbed in any
way by the enabling of VLAN filtering on the bridge device(s). If the VLAN
filtering setting is global to the entire chip, then the standalone ports
should indicate to the network stack that VLAN filtering is required by setting
'rx-vlan-filter: on [fixed]' in the ethtool features.
Because VLAN filtering can be turned on/off at runtime, the switchdev driver
must be able to reconfigure the underlying hardware on the fly to honor the
toggling of that option and behave appropriately. If that is not possible, the
switchdev driver can also refuse to support dynamic toggling of the VLAN
filtering knob at runtime and require a destruction of the bridge device(s) and
creation of new bridge device(s) with a different VLAN filtering value to
ensure VLAN awareness is pushed down to the hardware.
Even when VLAN filtering in the bridge is turned off, the underlying switch
hardware and driver may still configure itself in a VLAN-aware mode provided
that the behavior described above is observed.
The VLAN protocol of the bridge plays a role in deciding whether a packet is
treated as tagged or not: a bridge using the 802.1ad protocol must treat both
VLAN-untagged packets, as well as packets tagged with 802.1Q headers, as
untagged.
The 802.1p (VID 0) tagged packets must be treated in the same way by the device
as untagged packets, since the bridge device does not allow the manipulation of
VID 0 in its database.
When the bridge has VLAN filtering enabled and a PVID is not configured on the
ingress port, untagged 802.1p tagged packets must be dropped. When the bridge
has VLAN filtering enabled and a PVID exists on the ingress port, untagged and
priority-tagged packets must be accepted and forwarded according to the
bridge's port membership of the PVID VLAN. When the bridge has VLAN filtering
disabled, the presence/lack of a PVID should not influence the packet
forwarding decision.
Bridge IGMP snooping
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The Linux bridge allows the configuration of IGMP snooping (statically, at
interface creation time, or dynamically, during runtime) which must be observed
by the underlying switchdev network device/hardware in the following way:
- when IGMP snooping is turned off, multicast traffic must be flooded to all
ports within the same bridge that have mcast_flood=true. The CPU/management
port should ideally not be flooded (unless the ingress interface has
IFF_ALLMULTI or IFF_PROMISC) and continue to learn multicast traffic through
the network stack notifications. If the hardware is not capable of doing that
then the CPU/management port must also be flooded and multicast filtering
happens in software.
- when IGMP snooping is turned on, multicast traffic must selectively flow
to the appropriate network ports (including CPU/management port). Flooding of
unknown multicast should be only towards the ports connected to a multicast
router (the local device may also act as a multicast router).
The switch must adhere to RFC 4541 and flood multicast traffic accordingly
since that is what the Linux bridge implementation does.
Because IGMP snooping can be turned on/off at runtime, the switchdev driver
must be able to reconfigure the underlying hardware on the fly to honor the
toggling of that option and behave appropriately.
A switchdev driver can also refuse to support dynamic toggling of the multicast
snooping knob at runtime and require the destruction of the bridge device(s)
and creation of a new bridge device(s) with a different multicast snooping
value.
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