Re: [RFC PATCH net-next V2 0/6] XDP rx handler

From: David Ahern
Date: Wed Sep 05 2018 - 13:20:27 EST


[ sorry for the delay; focused on the nexthop RFC ]

On 8/20/18 12:34 AM, Jason Wang wrote:
>
>
> On 2018å08æ18æ 05:15, David Ahern wrote:
>> On 8/15/18 9:34 PM, Jason Wang wrote:
>>> I may miss something but BPF forbids loop. Without a loop how can we
>>> make sure all stacked devices is enumerated correctly without knowing
>>> the topology in advance?
>> netdev_for_each_upper_dev_rcu
>>
>> BPF helpers allow programs to do lookups in kernel tables, in this case
>> the ability to find an upper device that would receive the packet.
>
> So if I understand correctly, you mean using
> netdev_for_each_upper_dev_rcu() inside a BPF helper? If yes, I think we
> may still need device specific logic. E.g for macvlan,
> netdev_for_each_upper_dev_rcu() enumerates all macvlan devices on top a
> lower device. But what we need is one of the macvlan that matches the
> dst mac address which is similar to what XDP rx handler did. And it
> would become more complicated if we have multiple layers of device.

My device lookup helper takes the base port index (starting device),
vlan protocol, vlan tag and dest mac. So, yes, the mac address is used
to uniquely identify the stacked device.

>
> So let's consider a simple case, consider we have 5 macvlan devices:
>
> macvlan0: doing some packet filtering before passing packets to TCP/IP
> stack
> macvlan1: modify packets and redirect to another interface
> macvlan2: modify packets and transmit packet back through XDP_TX
> macvlan3: deliver packets to AF_XDP
> macvtap0: deliver packets raw XDP to VM
>
> So, with XDP rx handler, what we need to just to attach five different
> XDP programs to each macvlan device. Your idea is to do all things in
> the root device XDP program. This looks complicated and not flexible
> since it needs to care a lot of things, e.g adding/removing
> actions/policies. And XDP program needs to call BPF helper that use
> netdev_for_each_upper_dev_rcu() to work correctly with stacked device.
>

Stacking on top of a nic port can have all kinds of combinations of
vlans, bonds, bridges, vlans on bonds and bridges, macvlans, etc. I
suspect trying to install a program for layer 3 forwarding on each one
and iteratively running the programs would kill the performance gained
from forwarding with xdp.