[PATCH RFC v1 net-next 00/12] bridge-fastpath and related improvements

[Felix Fietkau]

Hi Eric,

On 14.10.24 20:29, Eric Woudstra wrote:
> It would be no problem for me to change the subject and body, if you
> think that is better.
> 
> The thing is, these patches actually make it possible to set up a fully
> functional software fastpath between bridged interfaces. Only after the
> software fastpath is set up and functional, it can be offloaded, which
> happens to by my personal motivation to write this patch-set.
> 
> If the offload flag is set in the flowtable, the software fastpath will
> be offloaded. But in this patch-set, there is nothing that changes
> anything there, the existing code is used unchanged.

FWIW, a while back, I also wanted to add a software fast path for the 
bridge layer to the kernel, also with the intention of using it for 
hardware offload. It wasn't accepted back then, because (if I remember 
correctly) people didn't want any extra complexity in the network stack 
to make the bridge layer faster.

Because of that, I created this piece of software:
https://github.com/nbd168/bridger

It uses an eBPF TC classifier for discovering flows and handling the 
software fast path, and also creates hardware offload rules for flows.
With that, hardware offloading for bridged LAN->WLAN flows is fully 
supported on MediaTek hardware with upstream kernels.

- Felix