Re: [PATCH 1/3] sfq: timer is deferrable

[Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta.com>]

On Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:34:46 -0800
"Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 02:49:00PM -0800, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> > The perturbation timer used for re-keying can be deferred, it doesn't
> > need to be deterministic.
> 
> The only concern that I can come up with is that the sfq_perturbation
> timer might be on one CPU, and all the operations using the corresponding
> SFQ on another.  This could in theory allow a nearly omniscient attacker
> to exploit an SFQ imbalance while preventing perturbation of the hash
> function.
> 
> This does not seem to be a valid concern at this point, since there are
> very few uses of init_timer_deferrable().  And if it should become a
> problem, one approach would be to have some sort of per-timer limit to
> the deferral.  Of course, at that point one would need to figure out
> what this limit should be!
> 
> Acked-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>

But the only threat is getting more bandwidth for a longer interval.
It is all kind of moot anyway because the bandwidth hogs all open
multiple connections anyway, so SFQ is of no use.

-- 
Stephen Hemminger <stephen.hemminger@vyatta.com>