Re: [PATCH] netfilter: use per-cpu spinlock rather than RCU

Eric Dumazet
2009-04-13T17:42:29Z

Stephen Hemminger a écrit :
> This is an alternative version of ip/ip6/arp tables locking using
> per-cpu locks. This avoids the overhead of synchronize_net() during
> update but still removes the expensive rwlock in earlier versions.
>
> The idea for this came from an earlier version done by Eric Duzamet.
> Locking is done per-cpu, the fast path locks on the current cpu
> and updates counters. The slow case involves acquiring the locks on
> all cpu's.
>
> The mutex that was added for 2.6.30 in xt_table is unnecessary since
> there already is a mutex for xt[af].mutex that is held.
>
> Tested basic functionality (add/remove/list), but don't have test cases
> for stress, ip6tables or arptables.
>
> Signed-off-by: Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta.com>

Patch seems good to me, but apparently xt_replace_table()
misses the "acquiring the locks on all cpus" you mentioned in ChangeLog ?

I am still off-computers until tomorrow so cannot provide a patch for this, sorry.

Some form of

local_bh_disable();
for_each_possible_cpu(cpu)
spin_lock(&per_cpu(ip_tables_lock, cpu));

oldinfo = private;
/* do the substitution */
table->private = newinfo;
newinfo->initial_entries = oldinfo->initial_entries;

for_each_possible_cpu(cpu)
spin_unlock(&per_cpu(ip_tables_lock, cpu));
local_bh_enable();

But I wonder if this could hit a limit of max spinlocks held by this cpu, say on a 4096 cpu machine ?