Hyper-V vsock streams do not fill the supplied buffer in full

Hyper-V vsock streams do not fill the supplied buffer in full

[Gary Guo]

When a vsock stream is called with recvmsg with a buffer, it only fills
the buffer with data from the first single VM packet. Even if there are
more VM packets at the time and the buffer is still not completely
filled, it will just leave the buffer partially filled.

This causes some issues when in WSLD which uses the vsock in
non-blocking mode and uses epoll.

For stream-oriented sockets, the epoll man page [1] says that

> For stream-oriented files (e.g., pipe, FIFO, stream socket),
> the condition that the read/write I/O space is exhausted can
> also be detected by checking the amount of data read from /
> written to the target file descriptor.  For example, if you
> call read(2) by asking to read a certain amount of data and
> read(2) returns a lower number of bytes, you can be sure of
> having exhausted the read I/O space for the file descriptor.

This has been used as an optimisation in the wild for reducing number
of syscalls required for stream sockets (by asserting that the socket
will not have to polled to EAGAIN in edge-trigger mode, if the buffer
given to recvmsg is not filled completely). An example is Tokio, which
starting in v1.21.0 [2].

When this optimisation combines with the behaviour of Hyper-V vsock, it
causes issue in this scenario:
* the VM host send data to the guest, and it's splitted into multiple
  VM packets
* sk_data_ready is called and epoll returns, notifying the userspace
  that the socket is ready
* userspace call recvmsg with a buffer, and it's partially filled
* userspace assumes that the stream socket is depleted, and if new data
  arrives epoll will notify it again.
* kernel always considers the socket to be ready, and since it's in
  edge-trigger mode, the epoll instance will never be notified again.

This different realisation of the readiness causes the userspace to
block forever.

[0] https://github.com/nbdd0121/wsld/issues/32
[1] https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/epoll.7.html#:~:text=For%20stream%2Doriented%20files
[2] https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio/pull/4840

Re: Hyper-V vsock streams do not fill the supplied buffer in full

[Stefano Garzarella]

Hi Gary,

On Wed, Jul 5, 2023 at 12:45 AM Gary Guo <gary@garyguo.net> wrote:
>
> When a vsock stream is called with recvmsg with a buffer, it only fills
> the buffer with data from the first single VM packet. Even if there are
> more VM packets at the time and the buffer is still not completely
> filled, it will just leave the buffer partially filled.
>
> This causes some issues when in WSLD which uses the vsock in
> non-blocking mode and uses epoll.
>
> For stream-oriented sockets, the epoll man page [1] says that
>
> > For stream-oriented files (e.g., pipe, FIFO, stream socket),
> > the condition that the read/write I/O space is exhausted can
> > also be detected by checking the amount of data read from /
> > written to the target file descriptor.  For example, if you
> > call read(2) by asking to read a certain amount of data and
> > read(2) returns a lower number of bytes, you can be sure of
> > having exhausted the read I/O space for the file descriptor.
>
> This has been used as an optimisation in the wild for reducing number
> of syscalls required for stream sockets (by asserting that the socket
> will not have to polled to EAGAIN in edge-trigger mode, if the buffer
> given to recvmsg is not filled completely). An example is Tokio, which
> starting in v1.21.0 [2].
>
> When this optimisation combines with the behaviour of Hyper-V vsock, it
> causes issue in this scenario:
> * the VM host send data to the guest, and it's splitted into multiple
>   VM packets
> * sk_data_ready is called and epoll returns, notifying the userspace
>   that the socket is ready
> * userspace call recvmsg with a buffer, and it's partially filled
> * userspace assumes that the stream socket is depleted, and if new data
>   arrives epoll will notify it again.
> * kernel always considers the socket to be ready, and since it's in
>   edge-trigger mode, the epoll instance will never be notified again.
>
> This different realisation of the readiness causes the userspace to
> block forever.

Thanks for the detailed description of the problem.

I think we should fix the hvs_stream_dequeue() in
net/vmw_vsock/hyperv_transport.c.
We can do something similar to what we do in
virtio_transport_stream_do_dequeue() in
net/vmw_vsock/virtio_transport_common.c

@Dexuan WDYT?

Thanks,
Stefano

RE: Hyper-V vsock streams do not fill the supplied buffer in full

[Dexuan Cui]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stefano Garzarella <sgarzare@redhat.com>
> Sent: Thursday, July 6, 2023 3:02 AM
> To: Gary Guo <gary@garyguo.net>; Dexuan Cui <decui@microsoft.com>
> Cc: KY Srinivasan <kys@microsoft.com>; Haiyang Zhang
> <haiyangz@microsoft.com>; Wei Liu <wei.liu@kernel.org>; linux-
> hyperv@vger.kernel.org; virtualization@lists.linux-foundation.org;
> netdev@vger.kernel.org; linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
> Subject: Re: Hyper-V vsock streams do not fill the supplied buffer in full
> 
> Hi Gary,
> 
> On Wed, Jul 5, 2023 at 12:45 AM Gary Guo <gary@garyguo.net> wrote:
> >
> > When a vsock stream is called with recvmsg with a buffer, it only fills
> > the buffer with data from the first single VM packet. Even if there are
> > more VM packets at the time and the buffer is still not completely
> > filled, it will just leave the buffer partially filled.
> >
> > This causes some issues when in WSLD which uses the vsock in
> > non-blocking mode and uses epoll.
> >
> > For stream-oriented sockets, the epoll man page [1] says that
> >
> > > For stream-oriented files (e.g., pipe, FIFO, stream socket),
> > > the condition that the read/write I/O space is exhausted can
> > > also be detected by checking the amount of data read from /
> > > written to the target file descriptor.  For example, if you
> > > call read(2) by asking to read a certain amount of data and
> > > read(2) returns a lower number of bytes, you can be sure of
> > > having exhausted the read I/O space for the file descriptor.
> >
> > This has been used as an optimisation in the wild for reducing number
> > of syscalls required for stream sockets (by asserting that the socket
> > will not have to polled to EAGAIN in edge-trigger mode, if the buffer
> > given to recvmsg is not filled completely). An example is Tokio, which
> > starting in v1.21.0 [2].
> >
> > When this optimisation combines with the behaviour of Hyper-V vsock, it
> > causes issue in this scenario:
> > * the VM host send data to the guest, and it's splitted into multiple
> >   VM packets
> > * sk_data_ready is called and epoll returns, notifying the userspace
> >   that the socket is ready
> > * userspace call recvmsg with a buffer, and it's partially filled
> > * userspace assumes that the stream socket is depleted, and if new data
> >   arrives epoll will notify it again.
> > * kernel always considers the socket to be ready, and since it's in
> >   edge-trigger mode, the epoll instance will never be notified again.
> >
> > This different realisation of the readiness causes the userspace to
> > block forever.
> 
> Thanks for the detailed description of the problem.
> 
> I think we should fix the hvs_stream_dequeue() in
> net/vmw_vsock/hyperv_transport.c.
> We can do something similar to what we do in
> virtio_transport_stream_do_dequeue() in
> net/vmw_vsock/virtio_transport_common.c
> 
> @Dexuan WDYT?
> 
> Thanks,
> Stefano

(Sorry for the late response...)

Thanks Gary Guo for the good analysis!

I didn't realize that hvs_stream_dequeue() is supposed to
copy as much data as possible to the userspace in the case
of EPOLLET mode. 

Yes, I think we should fix hvs_stream_dequeue(). We'll try to get
this fixed asap.

Thanks,
-- Dexuan