Re: [PATCH] conntrack: use SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU for nf_conn structs

[Patrick McHardy <kaber@trash.net>]

Eric Dumazet wrote:
> Patrick McHardy a écrit :
>> I think double entries are not a problem, as you say, there
>> are already other cases where this can happen. But I think we
>> should try our best that every entry present at the start and
>> still present at the end of a dump is also contained in the
>> dump, otherwise the guantees seem to weak to still be useful.
>> Your first proposal would do exactly that, right?
> 
> If your concern is to not forget entries, and we are allowed to print some entries several times,
> then we can just check the final "nulls" value, and if we find a different value than expected for
> chain N, go back to begining of chain N.
> 
> No need to check hash value (this could help not print several time same entry, we dont care that much)
> 
> +       while (is_a_nulls(head)) {
> +               if (likely(get_nulls_value(head) == st->bucket)) {
> +                       if (++st->bucket >= nf_conntrack_htable_size)
> +                               return NULL;
> +               }

Looks perfect :)

> [PATCH] conntrack: use SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU and get rid of call_rcu()
> 
> Use "hlist_nulls" infrastructure we added in 2.6.29 for RCUification of UDP & TCP.
> 
> This permits an easy conversion from call_rcu() based hash lists to a
> SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU one.
> 
> Avoiding call_rcu() delay at nf_conn freeing time has numerous gains.
> 
> First, it doesnt fill RCU queues (up to 10000 elements per cpu).
> This reduces OOM possibility, if queued elements are not taken into account
> This reduces latency problems when RCU queue size hits hilimit and triggers
> emergency mode.
> 
> - It allows fast reuse of just freed elements, permitting better use of
> CPU cache.
> 
> - We delete rcu_head from "struct nf_conn", shrinking size of this structure
> by 8 or 16 bytes.
> 
> This patch only takes care of "struct nf_conn".
> call_rcu() is still used for less critical conntrack parts, that may
> be converted later if necessary.

Applied, thanks a lot.