These are needed to support vxlan encapsulation. In a vxlan packet,
the only place we can straightforwardly hold the source and
destination peer identifiers used by the weave router is in the
24-bit VNI (vxlan network identifier) field. This gives us 12 bits to
indicate a peer. The resulting limit of 4096 peers on a weave network
does not seem like a problem in the near future. But it does mean
that decentralized allocation makes collisions fairly likely even in
weave networks of sizes that are common today. Fortunately, the
problem is much more tractable than IPAM because we can detect when
collisions occur and take action to resolve them.
For fast datapath, the router core will only be invoked upon datapath
misses. And it needs to yield routing decisions in a form that can be
used to configure the in-kernel datapath. So here we make the router
core yield FlowOps, which represent operations which actually do
something with a packet. The router core obtains these in turn from
the Bridge or the Overlay, depending on what it wants to do with
a packet.
For fast datapath, it's critical that the router makes decisions based
only on the required packet header information (as the same header
information will be used when configuring the ODP flow rules). So we
pass only that information into the router core, in the form of
PacketKeys.
The overall effect is to curry the router core: Rather than taking a
packet and doing something with it, it takes packet header information
and returns a function that does something with a packet.
This introduces interfaces to represent the packet forwarding
mechanism, and brings all the scattered UDP-related code together into
a single implementation.
This is not a pure refactoring, although much of the code in sleeve.go
has been copied from pre-existing code, and the UDP protocol remains
the same in spirit. The biggest change is the organization of the
forwarder goroutines (there is now one instead of two, and that
goroutine does a lot of auxiliary work as well as forwarding).
Performance testing between VMs on my laptop suggests that packet
throughput has not gone down, and may even have improved slightly.
David Wragg