1. 23 Jul, 2012 1 commit
    • David S. Miller's avatar
      Merge branch 'kill_rtcache' · 5e9965c1
      David S. Miller authored
      The ipv4 routing cache is non-deterministic, performance wise, and is
      subject to reasonably easy to launch denial of service attacks.
      
      The routing cache works great for well behaved traffic, and the world
      was a much friendlier place when the tradeoffs that led to the routing
      cache's design were considered.
      
      What it boils down to is that the performance of the routing cache is
      a product of the traffic patterns seen by a system rather than being a
      product of the contents of the routing tables.  The former of which is
      controllable by external entitites.
      
      Even for "well behaved" legitimate traffic, high volume sites can see
      hit rates in the routing cache of only ~%10.
      
      The general flow of this patch series is that first the routing cache
      is removed.  We build a completely new rtable entry every lookup
      request.
      
      Next we make some simplifications due to the fact that removing the
      routing cache causes several members of struct rtable to become no
      longer necessary.
      
      Then we need to make some amends such that we can legally cache
      pre-constructed routes in the FIB nexthops.  Firstly, we need to
      invalidate routes which are hit with nexthop exceptions.  Secondly we
      have to change the semantics of rt->rt_gateway such that zero means
      that the destination is on-link and non-zero otherwise.
      
      Now that the preparations are ready, we start caching precomputed
      routes in the FIB nexthops.  Output and input routes need different
      kinds of care when determining if we can legally do such caching or
      not.  The details are in the commit log messages for those changes.
      
      The patch series then winds down with some more struct rtable
      simplifications and other tidy ups that remove unnecessary overhead.
      
      On a SPARC-T3 output route lookups are ~876 cycles.  Input route
      lookups are ~1169 cycles with rpfilter disabled, and about ~1468
      cycles with rpfilter enabled.
      
      These measurements were taken with the kbench_mod test module in the
      net_test_tools GIT tree:
      
      git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net_test_tools.git
      
      That GIT tree also includes a udpflood tester tool and stresses
      route lookups on packet output.
      
      For example, on the same SPARC-T3 system we can run:
      
      	time ./udpflood -l 10000000 10.2.2.11
      
      with routing cache:
      real    1m21.955s       user    0m6.530s        sys     1m15.390s
      
      without routing cache:
      real    1m31.678s       user    0m6.520s        sys     1m25.140s
      
      Performance undoubtedly can easily be improved further.
      
      For example fib_table_lookup() performs a lot of excessive
      computations with all the masking and shifting, some of it
      conditionalized to deal with edge cases.
      
      Also, Eric's no-ref optimization for input route lookups can be
      re-instated for the FIB nexthop caching code path.  I would be really
      pleased if someone would work on that.
      
      In fact anyone suitable motivated can just fire up perf on the loading
      of the test net_test_tools benchmark kernel module.  I spend much of
      my time going:
      
      bash# perf record insmod ./kbench_mod.ko dst=172.30.42.22 src=74.128.0.1 iif=2
      bash# perf report
      
      Thanks to helpful feedback from Joe Perches, Eric Dumazet, Ben
      Hutchings, and others.
      Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
      5e9965c1
  2. 22 Jul, 2012 22 commits
  3. 21 Jul, 2012 15 commits
  4. 20 Jul, 2012 2 commits