ipfw add skipto tablearg....

[Luigi Rizzo]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 04:06:05AM +1000, Ian Smith wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Aug 2008, Luigi Rizzo wrote:
>  > On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 11:12:04PM +1000, Ian Smith wrote:
...
>  > > Until $someone adds a direct skipto target jump at the virtual machine
>  > > code level - big recalc hit when adding/deleting rules/sets I suppose -
>  > > it's still the fastest way to get from a to b, where b > a
>  > 
>  > you mean with tables-based skipto targets ? Because the regular
>  > skipto has been a constant-time op forever, even in ipfw1 i believe,
>  > invalidating the target cache on a change and recomputing it the
>  > fly at the first request.
> 
> Thanks; I'd completely missed the caching of skipto targets before, and 
> it's all so well commented too.  blushing, but glad for the good news.
> 
> But yes I was pondering Julian's patch, which has to lookup_next_rule 
> every time, and also Mike's bending of divert reentry rule number in 
> ipfw-classifyd with similar intent, which also has to hunt forward in 
> linear time for its target rule - or am I missing something else here?

well, you can use a hash table to support that. It shouldn't be so bad
to implement, flow tables already use hash tables so one can reuse the same code.

>  > > Speaking of which, should ipfw whinge when asked to skip backwards,
>  > > which it can't, confirmed on a recent browse re Mike's ipfw-classifyd
>  > > and a local test months ago.
>  > 
>  > right... but the error can only be reliably detected in the kernel,
>  > as the rule number is not always known when the rule is added.
> 
> Yes I meant at run-time.  On second thoughts, it'd be too easy a way to 

actually you can do it at insertion time, it's just that you cannot
do it in userland as other checks before inserting the rule.

	cheers
	luigi