DESIGN: Document uses for flow cookies.

The paragraph near the end that starts out "However, unlike OpenFlow 1.1,
..." seems to correctly document OVS behavior, but it also seems like
pretty lousy behavior.  Justin says that he's going to fix it before we
put out an OVS release version with this behavior.

CC: Justin Pettit <jpettit@nicira.com>
Signed-off-by: Ben Pfaff <blp@nicira.com>

diff --git a/DESIGN b/DESIGN
index e43878b..e59dc6e 100644 (file)
--- a/DESIGN
+++ b/DESIGN
@@ -146,6 +146,71 @@ sends flow_removed message   ---    ---     ---      %       %
     receive the generated messages.)
 
 
+Flow Cookies
+============
+
+OpenFlow 1.0 and later versions have the concept of a "flow cookie",
+which is a 64-bit integer value attached to each flow.  The treatment
+of the flow cookie has varied greatly across OpenFlow versions,
+however.
+
+In OpenFlow 1.0:
+
+        - OFPFC_ADD set the cookie in the flow that it added.
+
+        - OFPFC_MODIFY and OFPFC_MODIFY_STRICT updated the cookie for
+          the flow or flows that it modified.
+
+        - OFPST_FLOW messages included the flow cookie.
+
+        - OFPT_FLOW_REMOVED messages reported the cookie of the flow
+          that was removed.
+
+OpenFlow 1.1 made the following changes:
+
+        - Flow mod operations OFPFC_MODIFY, OFPFC_MODIFY_STRICT,
+          OFPFC_DELETE, and OFPFC_DELETE_STRICT, plus flow stats
+          requests and aggregate stats requests, gained the ability to
+          match on flow cookies with an arbitrary mask.
+
+        - OFPFC_MODIFY and OFPFC_MODIFY_STRICT were changed to add a
+          new flow, in the case of no match, only if the flow table
+          modification operation did not match on the cookie field.
+          (In OpenFlow 1.0, modify operations always added a new flow
+          when there was no match.)
+
+        - OFPFC_MODIFY and OFPFC_MODIFY_STRICT no longer updated flow
+          cookies.
+
+OpenFlow 1.2 made the following changes:
+
+        - OFPC_MODIFY and OFPFC_MODIFY_STRICT were changed to never
+          add a new flow, regardless of whether the flow cookie was
+          used for matching.
+
+Open vSwitch support for OpenFlow 1.0 implements the OpenFlow 1.0
+behavior with the following extensions:
+
+        - An NXM extension field NXM_NX_COOKIE(_W) allows the NXM
+          versions of OFPFC_MODIFY, OFPFC_MODIFY_STRICT, OFPFC_DELETE,
+          and OFPFC_DELETE_STRICT flow_mods, plus flow stats requests
+          and aggregate stats requests, to match on flow cookies with
+          arbitrary masks.  This is much like the equivalent OpenFlow
+          1.1 feature.
+
+        - However, unlike OpenFlow 1.1, OFPC_MODIFY and
+          OFPFC_MODIFY_STRICT, regardless of whether there was a match
+          based on a cookie or not, always add a new flow if there is
+          no match, and they always update the cookies of flows that
+          they do match.
+
+        - NXT_PACKET_IN (the Nicira extended version of
+          OFPT_PACKET_IN) reports the cookie of the rule that
+          generated the packet, or all-1-bits if no rule generated the
+          packet.  (Older versions of OVS used all-0-bits instead of
+          all-1-bits.)
+
+
 Multiple Table Support
 ======================