Isolated mode can be requested by applications on individual ports to avoid
ingress traffic outside of the flow rules they define.
Besides making ingress more deterministic, it allows PMDs to safely reuse
resources otherwise assigned to handle the remaining traffic, such as
global RSS configuration settings, VLAN filters, MAC address entries,
legacy filter API rules and so on in order to expand the set of possible
flow rule types.
To minimize code complexity, PMDs implementing this mode may provide
partial (or even no) support for flow rules when not enabled (e.g. no
priorities, no RSS action). Applications written to use the flow API are
therefore encouraged to enable it.
Once effective, leaving isolated mode may not be possible depending on PMD
implementation.
Signed-off-by: Adrien Mazarguil <adrien.mazarguil@6wind.com>
Acked-by: Nelio Laranjeiro <nelio.laranjeiro@6wind.com>
Acked-by: Andrew Rybchenko <arybchenko@solarflare.com>
Based on initial PMD implementations of the flow API, returning the error
structure which may be NULL is useless and always discarded.
Returning the error code instead appears to be much more convenient.
Signed-off-by: Adrien Mazarguil <adrien.mazarguil@6wind.com>
This new API supersedes all the legacy filter types described in
rte_eth_ctrl.h. It is slightly higher level and as a result relies more on
PMDs to process and validate flow rules.
Benefits:
- A unified API is easier to program for, applications do not have to be
written for a specific filter type which may or may not be supported by
the underlying device.
- The behavior of a flow rule is the same regardless of the underlying
device, applications do not need to be aware of hardware quirks.
- Extensible by design, API/ABI breakage should rarely occur if at all.
- Documentation is self-standing, no need to look up elsewhere.
Existing filter types will be deprecated and removed in the near future.
Signed-off-by: Adrien Mazarguil <adrien.mazarguil@6wind.com>
Acked-by: Olga Shern <olgas@mellanox.com>
