Table 6, Flow specific parameters – Dell Mellanox Family of Adapters User Manual
Page 40

Driver Installation and Configuration
Rev 1.1
Mellanox Technologies
40
Output parameters:
Returns 0 on success, or the value of errno on failure.
For further information, please refer to the
ibv_destroy_flow
man page.
•
Ethtool
Ethtool domain is used to attach an RX ring, specifically its QP to a specified flow.
Please refer to the most recent ethtool manpage for all the ways to specify a flow.
Examples:
•
ethtool –U eth5 flow-type ether dst 00:11:22:33:44:55 loc 5 action 2
All packets that contain the above destination MAC address are to be steered into rx-ring 2 (its
underlying QP), with priority 5 (within the ethtool domain)
•
ethtool –U eth5 flow-type tcp4 src-ip 1.2.3.4 dst-port 8888 loc 5 action 2
All packets that contain the above destination IP address and source port are to be steered into rx-
ring 2. When destination MAC is not given, the user's destination MAC is filled automatically.
•
ethtool –u eth5
Shows all of ethtool’s steering rule
When configuring two rules with the same priority, the second rule will overwrite the first one, so this
ethtool interface is effectively a table. Inserting Flow Steering rules in the kernel requires support
from both the ethtool in the user space and in kernel (v2.6.28).
MLX4 Driver Support
The mlx4 driver supports only a subset of the flow specification the ethtool API defines. Asking for
an unsupported flow specification will result with an “invalid value” failure.
The following are the flow specific parameters:
•
RFS
RFS is an in-kernel-logic responsible for load balancing between CPUs by attaching flows to CPUs
that are used by flow’s owner applications. This domain allows the RFS mechanism to use the flow
steering infrastructure to support the RFS logic by implementing the
ndo_rx_flow_steer
, which, in
turn, calls the underlying flow steering mechanism with the RFS domain.
Enabling the RFS requires enabling the
‘ntuple’
flag via the ethtool,
For example, to enable ntuple for eth0, run:
Table 6 - Flow Specific Parameters
ether
tcp4/udp4
ip4
Mandatory
dst
src-ip/dst-ip
Optional
vlan
src-ip, dst-ip, src-
port, dst-port, vlan
src-ip, dst-ip, vlan
ethtool -K eth0 ntuple on