Adding Flow Director sysctls to ixgbe(4)

[Ben Hutchings]

On Thu, 2011-09-08 at 08:34 -0400, John Baldwin wrote:
> On Monday, September 05, 2011 7:21:12 am Ben Hutchings wrote:
> > On Mon, 2011-09-05 at 15:51 +0900, Takuya ASADA wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > I implemented Ethernet Flow Director sysctls to ixgbe(4), here's a detail:
> > > 
> > > - Adding removing signature filter
> > > On linux version of ixgbe driver, it has ability to set/remove perfect
> > > filter from userland using ethtool command.
> > > I implemented similar feature, but on sysctl, and not perfect filter
> > > but signature filter(which means hash collision may occurs).
> > [...]
> > 
> > Linux also has a generic interface to RX filtering and hashing
> > (ethtool_rxnfc) which ixgbe supports; wouldn't it be better for FreeBSD
> > to support something like that?
> 
> Some sort of shared interface might be nice.  The cxgb(4) and cxgbe(4) drivers
> both provide their own tools to manipulate filters, though they do not
> provide explicit steering IIRC.
> 
> We would need to come up with some sort of standard interface (ioctls?) for 
> adding filters however.

On Linux, filtering and steering are supported on the Freescale TSEC/FEC
(gianfar), Intel Niantic (ixgbe), Solarflare (sfc) and Sun Neptune (niu)
hardware.  The exact capabilities of the hardware are all quite
different and we're still recovering from the early mistake of defining
two subtly different interfaces.  I believe several other 10G Ethernet
vendors have implemented these sorts of hardware capabilities.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings, Staff Engineer, Solarflare
Not speaking for my employer; that's the marketing department's job.
They asked us to note that Solarflare product names are trademarked.