Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next 1/5] net: add support for noref skb->sk

From: Paolo Abeni <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2017 11:14:57 +0200

Hi,

Thank you for looking at it!

On Wed, 2017-09-20 at 10:41 -0700, Eric Dumazet wrote:
> On Wed, 2017-09-20 at 18:54 +0200, Paolo Abeni wrote:
> > Noref sk do not carry a socket refcount, are valid
> > only inside the current RCU section and must be
> > explicitly cleared before exiting such section.
> > 
> > They will be used in a later patch to allow early demux
> > without sock refcounting.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > +/* dummy destructor used by noref sockets */
> > +void sock_dummyfree(struct sk_buff *skb)
> > +{
> 
> BUG();
> 
> > +}
> > +EXPORT_SYMBOL(sock_dummyfree);
> > +

We can call sock_dummyfree() in legitimate paths, see below, but we can
add a:

WARN_ON_ONCE(!rcu_read_lock_held());

here and in  skb_clear_noref_sk(). That should help much to catch
possible bugs.

> I do not see how you ensure we do not leave RCU section with an skb
> destructor pointing to this sock_dummyfree()
> 
> This patch series looks quite dangerous to me.

The idea is to explicitly clear the sknoref references before leaving
the RCU section. Quite alike what we currently do for dst noref, but
here the only place where we get a noref socket is the socket early
demux, thus the scope of this change is more limited to what we have
with noref dst_entries.

The relevant code is in the next 2 patches; after the demux we preserve
the sknoref only if the skb has a local destination. The UDP socket
will then set the noref on early demux lookup, and the skb will either:

* land on the corresponding UDP socket, the receive function will steal
the sknoref
* be dropped by some nft/iptables target - the dummy destructor is
called
* forwarded by some nft/iptables target outside the input path; we
clear the skref explicitly in such targets. 

Currently there are an handful of places affected, and we can simplify
the code dropping the early demux result for locally terminated
multicast sockets on a host acting as a multicast router, please see
the comment on the next patch.

> Do we really have real applications using connected UDP sockets and
> wanting very high pps throughput ?

The ultimate goal is to improve the unconnected UDP sockets scenario,
we do actually have use cases for that - DNS servers and VoIP SBCs.

Thanks,

Paolo