The Open vSwitch kernel module uses the upcall mechanism to send
packets from kernel space to user space when it misses in the kernel
space flow table. The upcall sends packets via a Netlink socket.
Currently, a Netlink socket is created for every vport. In this way,
there is a 1:1 mapping between a vport and a Netlink socket.
When a packet is received by a vport, if it needs to be sent to
user space, it is sent via the corresponding Netlink socket.
This mechanism, with various iterations of the corresponding user
space code, has seen some limitations and issues:
* On systems with a large number of vports, there is a correspondingly
large number of Netlink sockets which can limit scaling.
(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1526306)
* Packet reordering on upcalls.
(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1844576)
* A thundering herd issue.
(https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1834444)
This patch introduces an alternative, feature-negotiated, upcall
mode using a per-cpu dispatch rather than a per-vport dispatch.
In this mode, the Netlink socket to be used for the upcall is
selected based on the CPU of the thread that is executing the upcall.
In this way, it resolves the issues above as:
a) The number of Netlink sockets scales with the number of CPUs
rather than the number of vports.
b) Ordering per-flow is maintained as packets are distributed to
CPUs based on mechanisms such as RSS and flows are distributed
to a single user space thread.
c) Packets from a flow can only wake up one user space thread.
The corresponding user space code can be found at:
https://mail.openvswitch.org/pipermail/ovs-dev/2021-July/385139.html
Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1844576
Signed-off-by: Mark Gray <mark.d.gray@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Flavio Leitner <fbl@sysclose.org>
Acked-by: Pravin B Shelar <pshelar@ovn.org>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
b83d23a2a3