I have a very specific questions about Linux Traffic control and u32 filters in particular. However, I don’t know where the right place is to ask such a question as it’s fairly niche.

The Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control site says it has a mailing list for questions, but the last post was from 2019. There is also the incredibly busy ‘linux-netdev’ mailing list, but, the traffic there looks like strictly source changes.

Any ideas?

The question I’m trying to find an answer to is: The u32 tc filter seems to support negative byte offsets which allows you to examine the Ethernet frame header (I don’t think I even found documentation on this, this is thanks to ChatGPT). However, when using u32 values to examine 8 bytes I can only use offsets in increments of 4 - like “at -8” or “at -12”, with any other increment giving me the error Illegal "match".

This seems like only a curiosity, but, I’ve been struggling to get my bit-matching to match the way I expect, and I’m wondering if this suggests that matching doesn’t function the way I think.

  • NotAnArdvarkOP
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    10 months ago

    I really appreciate this, thank you. I think I had confused myself by playing with ‘u16’ and ‘u8’ and somehow coming to the conclusion that they were matching the right side of a 32-bit string. (Which may still be true, but, I’m just masking u32s now).

    This is what I ended up with, which is working the way I’d expect:

    tc filter add dev wlan0 protocol ip parent 1: prio 1 u32 \
    	match u32 0x30d6 0x0000ffff at -16 \
    	match u32 0xc92d1905 0xffffffff at -12 flowid 1:20
    

    This sends Ethernet frames destined for 30:d6:c9:2d:19:05 to flow 1:20, and it doesn’t seem to match a second device I tested. So, all good! Thank you again.