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Commit 4336487e authored by David S. Miller's avatar David S. Miller
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Merge branch 'mlxsw-unified-bridge-conversion-part-1'



Ido Schimmel says:

====================
mlxsw: Unified bridge conversion - part 1/6

This set starts converting mlxsw to the unified bridge model and mainly
adds new device registers and extends existing ones that will be used in
follow-up patchsets.

High-level summary
==================

The unified bridge model is a new way of managing low-level device
objects such as filtering identifiers (FIDs). The conversion moves a lot
of logic out of the device's firmware towards the driver, but its main
selling point is that it allows to overcome various scalability issues
related to the amount of entries that need to be programmed to the
device.

The only (intended) user visible changes of the conversion are
improvement in resource utilization and ability to support more router
interfaces (RIFs) in Spectrum-{2,3}.

Details
=======

Commit 50853808 ("Merge branch
'mlxsw-Prepare-for-VLAN-aware-bridge-w-VxLAN'") converted mlxsw to
emulate 802.1Q FIDs (represent VLANs in a VLAN-aware bridge) using
802.1D FIDs (represent VLAN-unaware bridges). This was necessary because
at that time VNI could not be assigned to 802.1Q FIDs, which effectively
meant that mlxsw could not support VXLAN with VLAN-aware bridges.

The downside of this approach is that multiple {Port,VID}->FID entries
are required in order to classify incoming traffic to a FID, as opposed
to a single VID->FID entry that can be used with actual 802.1Q FIDs.

For example, if 10 ports are members in the same VLAN-aware bridge and
the same 100 VLANs are configured on each port, then only 100 VID->FID
entries are required with 802.1Q FIDs, whereas 1000 {Port,VID}->FID
entries are required with emulated 802.1Q FIDs.

The above limitation is the result of various assumptions that were made
in the design of the API that was exposed to software. In the unified
bridge model the API is much more "raw" and therefore avoids these
assumptions, allowing software to configure the device in a more
efficient manner.
====================

Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
parents a56b158a b3820922
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