Re: [PATCH net-next v2 6/9] net: macsec: hardware offloading infrastructure

[Florian Fainelli]

On 8/13/19 9:28 AM, Andrew Lunn wrote:
>> 1) With current implementation it's impossible to install SW macsec engine onto
>> the device which supports HW offload. That could be a strong limitation in
>> cases when user sees HW macsec offload is broken or work differently, and he/she
>> wants to replace it with SW one.
>> MACSec is a complex feature, and it may happen something is missing in HW.
>> Trivial example is 256bit encryption, which is not always a musthave in HW
>> implementations.
> 
> Ideally, we want the driver to return EOPNOTSUPP if it does not
> support something and the software implement should be used.
> 
> If the offload is broken, we want a bug report! And if it works
> differently, it suggests there is also a bug we need to fix, or the
> standard is ambiguous.
> 
> It would also be nice to add extra information to the netlink API to
> indicate if HW or SW is being used. In other places where we offload
> to accelerators we have such additional information.

Igor's point is entirely valid in that you should allow both offload to
HW for what is possible and offload to a software implementation for
what is not supported in HW.

Let's an example that is hopefully more familiar to the people in this
thread. Consider a NIC that can do single VLAN tag offload on xmit (or
receive, does not matter), and you find yourself using a double VLAN tag
configuration. You would create a first VLAN stacked network device
which is fully offloaded onto the underlying NIC, and a second VLAN
stacked network device on top of the first once which is not offloaded.

The way I would imagine a MACsec offload is kind of similar here, in
that it would be a macsec virtual network device on top of an underlying
physical device. If no offload is possible, the virtual network device's
xmit/receive path is used. If the NIC driver can offload it, it does
not. How it does it, whether at the MAC/DMA level, or at the PHY level
can be a check added at the appropriate level.
-- 
Florian