Subject: alternate queueing mechanism (was: [PATCH] unix: avoid use-after-free in ep_remove_wait_queue)

From: Rainer Weikusat <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2015 21:43:58 +0000

Rainer Weikusat <[email-masked]> writes:

[AF_UNIX SOCK_DGRAM throughput]

> It may be possible to improve this by tuning/ changing the flow
> control mechanism. Out of my head, I'd suggest making the queue longer
> (the default value is 10) and delaying wake ups until the server
> actually did catch up, IOW, the receive queue is empty or almost
> empty. But this ought to be done with a different patch.

Because I was curious about the effects, I implemented this using a
slightly modified design than the one I originally suggested to account
for the different uses of the 'is the receive queue full' check. The
code uses a datagram-specific checking function,

static int unix_dgram_recvq_full(struct sock const *sk)
{
	struct unix_sock *u;

	u = unix_sk(sk);
	if (test_bit(UNIX_DG_FULL, &u->flags))
		return 1;

	if (!unix_recvq_full(sk))
		return 0;

	__set_bit(UNIX_DG_FULL, &u->flags);
	return 1;
}

which gets called instead of the other for the n:1 datagram checks and a

if (test_bit(UNIX_DG_FULL, &u->flags) &&
    !skb_queue_len(&sk->sk_receive_queue)) {
	__clear_bit(UNIX_DG_FULL, &u->flags);
	wake_up_interruptible_sync_poll(&u->peer_wait,
					POLLOUT | POLLWRNORM |
					POLLWRBAND);
}

in unix_dgram_recvmsg to delay wakeups until the queued datagrams have
been consumed if the queue overflowed before. This has the additional,
nice side effect that wakeups won't ever be done for 1:1 connected
datagram sockets (both SOCK_DGRAM and SOCK_SEQPACKET) where they're of
no use, anyway.

Compared to a 'stock' 4.3 running the test program I posted (supposed to
make the overhead noticable by sending lots of small messages), the
average number of bytes sent per second increased by about 782,961.79
(ca 764.61K), about 5.32% of the 4.3 number (14,714,579.91), with a
fairly simple code change.