Project management for XDP and Open vSwitch integration

To simplify the design it would be beneficial to add a helper function to the OVS kernel module which will do the flow lookup and return the set of actions. If the flow does not exist, or can't be handled by XDP no actions are returned and the flow can pass through the normal kernel pipeline.

This design will also remove the complexity of duplicating the flow table in the XDP data space, and keeping it in sync.

Actions are processed in a linear fashion, one at a time, where the last action can be a recirculation resulting in another lookup and another set of actions.

In pseudo code the XDP main part could look like this:

for (iter = 0; iter < OVS_RECURSION_LIMIT; iter++) {

    actions = ovs_flow_lookup_helper(&key)
    if (!actions)
        return XDP_PASS; /* We need to handle the none first iter case */

    ret = do_ovs_actions(actions, &key)
    if (ret != RECIRCUITATE)
        break;

    if (iter == OVS_RECURSION_LIMIT - 1) {
                warn(unsupported flow)
        return XDP_DROP;
    }
}
return XDP_REDIRECT; /* If one or more packets got sent */

In the current OVS kernel code, the recirculation is limited to 5 iterations.

The sequence of actions can consist of sending the packet to port A, do some conntrack handling, add a tunnel header and sent it out port B.

So there is a need to make multiple clones of an ingress packet, do modifications, and sent out the clones to different ports. This part is currently missing from XDP.

TODO: Add more details on what actions the datapath can/will take. See the kernel function do_execute_actions() for some reference.