Rare project developers

[mc36 <>]

hi,
this question falls from the trivial:
right now, bffwd, as name suggests, only forwards messages from text to 
grpc...
this is a one-way communication... the only reverse path is counter 
reporting...
and this id appears on packets from cpuport's first 16 bits, this is how the
dataplane signals that which port got the packet that is decided for upper 
processing...
(on the cpuport, the reverse path also have this id to signal where the 
packet need to be sent...)
and this id is clearly not a single point of assignment because there are 
virtual
constructs like subinterface, dialer, virtualppp, pwether, bvi, tunnel and 
friends
which are clearly not in the dataplane, moreover we have dynamically created 
virtual-access
interfaces from pppoe, l2tp, vpls, evpn and friends... and tofino is not the 
only one,
on ebpf and dpdk we use the kernel's/dpdk's assigned handle...

to have a string at that location, i only see the following idea:
the dataplanes could report the id to string mapping during startup
then freerouter can store it and translate internally...
but then one still have to deal with the virtual constructs and assign them a 
usable id...
(in case of tofino, one that is cannot never ever be a physical port id to 
steal the traffic...)
regards,
cs


On 2/21/22 17:11, Alexander Gall wrote:
> Hi csaba, Frederic
>
> The current discion on the "Basic Bridge" on RARE-usres has reminded
> me of a feature that we should implement to increase the user
> experience.
>
> Currently, one has to specify the physical port ID in the
> "export-port" statement, which is a major problem for people who are
> not really familiar with Tofino inernals. IMHO, there is no reason at
> all to use the physical port there. Why not simply use the much
> friendlier "port/channel" (e.g. "1/0") identifier to directly address
> the ports on the device's front panel?  bf_forwarder can easily
> translate that into the physical port ID by a lookup in the
> $PORT_STR_INFO table.
>
> This would require to change the parser in freerouter as well as the
> format of the message passed to bf_forwarder.