Subject: Re: [PATCH bpf-next v7 1/3] bpf: Add "live packet" mode for XDP in bpf_prog_run()

From: Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2022 14:19:13 +0100

Alexei Starovoitov <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Fri, Jan 7, 2022 at 1:54 PM Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>
>> Because the data pages are recycled by the page pool, and the test runner
>> doesn't re-initialise them for each run, subsequent invocations of the XDP
>> program will see the packet data in the state it was after the last time it
>> ran on that particular page. This means that an XDP program that modifies
>> the packet before redirecting it has to be careful about which assumptions
>> it makes about the packet content, but that is only an issue for the most
>> naively written programs.
>
> This is too vague and partially incorrect.
> The bpf program can do bpf_xdp_adjust_meta() and otherwise change
> packet boundaries. These effects will be seen by subsequent
> XDP_PASS/TX/REDIRECT, but on the next iteration the boundaries
> will get reset to the original values.
> So the test runner actually re-initializes some parts of the data,
> but not the contents of the packet.
> At least that's my understanding of the patch.

Yes, that's correct. Boundaries will be reset, data won't. The boundary
reset was added later, though, so guess I neglected to update the commit
message. Will fix.

> The users shouldn't need to dig into implementation to discover this.
> Please document it.
> The more I think about it the more I believe that it warrants
> a little blurb in Documentation/bpf/ that describes what one can
> do with this "xdp live mode".

Sure, can do. Doesn't look like BPF_PROG_RUN is documented in there at
all, so guess I can start such a document :)

> Another question comes to mind:
> What happens when a program modifies the packet?
> Does it mean that the 2nd frame will see the modified data?
> It will not, right?
> It's the page pool size of packets that will be inited the same way
> at the beginning. Which is NAPI_POLL_WEIGHT * 2 == 128 packets.
> Why this number?

Yes, you're right: the next run won't see the modified packet data. The
128 pages is because we run the program loop in batches of 64 (like NAPI
does, the fact that TEST_XDP_BATCH and NAPI_POLL_WEIGHT are the same is
not a coincidence).

We need 2x because we want enough pages so we can keep running without
allocating more, and the first batch can still be in flight on a
different CPU while we're processing batch 2.

I experimented with different values, and 128 was the minimum size that
didn't have a significant negative impact on performance, and above that
saw diminishing returns.

> Should it be configurable?
> Then the user can say: init N packets with this one pattern
> and the program will know that exactly N invocation will be
> with the same data, but N+1 it will see the 1st packet again
> that potentially was modified by the program.
> Is it accurate?

I thought about making it configurable, but the trouble is that it's not
quite as straight-forward as the first N packets being "pristine": it
depends on what happens to the packet afterwards:

On XDP_DROP, the page will be recycled immediately, whereas on
XDP_{TX,REDIRECT} it will go through the egress driver after sitting in
the bulk queue for a little while, so you can get reordering compared to
the original execution order.

On XDP_PASS the kernel will release the page entirely from the pool when
building an skb, so you'll never see that particular page again (and
eventually page_pool will allocate a new batch that will be
re-initialised to the original value).

If we do want to support a "pristine data" mode, I think the least
cumbersome way would be to add a flag that would make the kernel
re-initialise the packet data before every program invocation. The
reason I didn't do this was because I didn't have a use case for it. The
traffic generator use case only rewrites a tiny bit of the packet
header, and it's just as easy to just keep rewriting it without assuming
a particular previous value. And there's also the possibility of just
calling bpf_prog_run() multiple times from userspace with a lower number
of repetitions...

I'm not opposed to adding such a flag if you think it would be useful,
though. WDYT?

-Toke