Subject: Re: [PATCH bpf-next 0/8] Extend SOCKMAP to store listening sockets

From: Jakub Sitnicki <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2019 10:22:55 +0100

On Sun, Nov 24, 2019 at 07:10 AM CET, John Fastabend wrote:
> Jakub Sitnicki wrote:
>> This patch set makes SOCKMAP more flexible by allowing it to hold TCP
>> sockets that are either in established or listening state. With it SOCKMAP
>> can act as a drop-in replacement for REUSEPORT_SOCKARRAY which reuseport
>> BPF programs use. Granted, it is limited to only TCP sockets.
>>
>> The idea started out at LPC '19 as feedback from John Fastabend to our
>> troubles with repurposing REUSEPORT_SOCKARRAY as a collection of listening
>> sockets accessed by a BPF program ran on socket lookup [1]. Without going
>> into details, REUSEPORT_SOCKARRAY proved to be tightly coupled with
>> reuseport logic. Talk from LPC (see slides [2] or video [3]) highlights
>> what problems we ran into when trying to make REUSEPORT_SOCKARRAY work for
>> our use-case.
>>
>> Patches have evolved quite a bit since the RFC series from a month ago
>> [4]. To recap the RFC feedback, John pointed out that BPF redirect helpers
>> for SOCKMAP need sane semantics when used with listening sockets [5], and
>> that SOCKMAP lookup from BPF would be useful [6]. While Martin asked for
>> UDP support [7].
>
> Curious if you've started looking into UDP support. I had hoped to do
> it but haven't got there yet.

No, not yet. I only made sure the newly added tests were easy to modify
to cover UDP by not hard-coding the socket type.

I expect to break ground with UDP work soon, though. Right after I push
out another iteration of programmable socket lookup [1] patches adapted for
SOCKMAP, which we've been testing internally.

>> As it happens, patches needed more work to get SOCKMAP to actually behave
>> correctly with listening sockets. It turns out flexibility has its
>> price. Change log below outlines them all.
>>
>
> But looks pretty clean to me, only major change here is to add an extra
> hook to remove psock from the child socket. And that looks fine to me and
> cleaner than any other solution I had in mind.
>
> Changes +/- looks good as well most the updates are in selftests to update
> tests and add some new ones. +1

Thanks for taking a look at the patches so quickly. I appreciate it.

-Jakub

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/[email-masked]/