One of the goals for Open vSwitch is to decouple kernel and userspace
software, so that either one can be upgraded or rolled back independent of
the other. To do this in full generality, it must be possible to add new
features to the kernel vport layer without changing userspace software.
The customary way to do this in the Linux networking stack is to use
Netlink and in particular Netlink attributes. This commit adopts that
model for the vport layer. It does not yet actually start using the
Netlink socket layer, which will come later.
Signed-off-by: Ben Pfaff <blp@nicira.com>
Acked-by: Jesse Gross <jesse@nicira.com>
For some time now, Open vSwitch datapaths have internally made a
distinction between adding a vport and attaching it to a datapath. Adding
a vport just means to create it, as an entity detached from any datapath.
Attaching it gives it a port number and a datapath. Similarly, a vport
could be detached and deleted separately.
After some study, I think I understand why this distinction exists. It is
because ovs-vswitchd tries to open all the datapath ports before it tries
to create them. However, changing it to create them before it tries to
open them is not difficult, so this commit does this.
The bulk of this commit, however, changes the datapath interface to one
that always creates a vport and attaches it to a datapath in a single step,
and similarly detaches a vport and deletes it in a single step.
Signed-off-by: Ben Pfaff <blp@nicira.com>
Acked-by: Jesse Gross <jesse@nicira.com>
The only real difference between netdev-patch and netdev-tunnel is in their
parse_config() implementation. That's a lot of extra code to maintain, for
questionable benefit. This commit merges them into the netdev-vport code,
which was heretofore merely a collection of helper functions.
In certain cases we require the ability to provide stats that are
added to the values collected by the kernel (currently only used
by bond fake devices). Internal devices previously implemented
this directly but now that their stats are now handled by the vport
layer the functionality has been moved there. This removes the
userspace code to set the stats and replaces it with a mechanism
to access the equivalent functionality in the vport layer.
