[OpenWrt-Devel] General questions about the direction of switch drivers

[David Lang]

On Mon, 16 Feb 2015, Charlie Smurthwaite wrote:

> I'm writing a driver for a family of 24 port gigabit switches, with a
> wide array of interesting hardware features. Creating basic VLAN
> membership and tagging functionality under the swconfig framework has
> been quite easy, and this framework has been excellent for this.
>
> However, I would like to support a lot more of the functionality of this
> hardware, and see other devices with advanced layer2 and layer3
> switching supported in the future, so I wanted some opinion on the
> direction things are taking.
>
> Specifically I am looking for opinion on whether the swconfig framework
> is suitable for more advanced functionality, or whether there was likely
> to be a move to any other upstream framework for switch devices,
> particularly those with more advanced functionality. The types of
> functionality I am currently interested in supporting are:
>
> * VLAN membership an tagging
> * Packet and byte counters
> * Security settings and filtering rules
> * STP
> * Layer 3 functionality (hardware IPv4 and IPv6 routing tables)
> * Hardware NAT / firewall
>
> Some of this functionality may simply require configuration, where other
> functions require the active involvement of the CPU.

A work-around for many of the items other than the basic VLAN membership and 
tagging is to force the traffic between the different switch ports to go through 
the CPU by putting the different ports on different VLANs and then using the 
kernel bridging/firewalling/etc features. You can't do this between switch ports 
that are trunked (exposeing the VLAN tags), but other than the cpu load and 
admin confusion, it works very well to just do this in the kernel. How much of 
the "functions that requrie active involvement of the CPU" end up 
being a variation of this?

I am curious as to what other switch device frameworks are out there.

It's worth noting that the vast majority of OpenWRT devices have a single switch 
in them, and that switch is typically not the fanciest (although the march of 
technology mens that every year it's going to be better than it used to be)

David Lang
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