Re: [PATCH bpf-next V1 7/7] net: xdp: update documentation for xdp-rx-metadata.rst

Jesper Dangaard Brouer
2025-06-17T16:15:40Z

On 16/06/2025 17.34, Stanislav Fomichev wrote:
> On 06/13, Jesper Dangaard Brouer wrote:
>>
>> On 11/06/2025 05.40, Stanislav Fomichev wrote:
>>> On 06/11, Lorenzo Bianconi wrote:
>>>>> Daniel Borkmann <daniel@iogearbox.net> writes:
>>>>>
>>>> [...]
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Why not have a new flag for bpf_redirect that transparently stores all
>>>>>>> available metadata? If you care only about the redirect -> skb case.
>>>>>>> Might give us more wiggle room in the future to make it work with
>>>>>>> traits.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Also q from my side: If I understand the proposal correctly, in order to fully
>>>>>> populate an skb at some point, you have to call all the bpf_xdp_metadata_* kfuncs
>>>>>> to collect the data from the driver descriptors (indirect call), and then yet
>>>>>> again all equivalent bpf_xdp_store_rx_* kfuncs to re-store the data in struct
>>>>>> xdp_rx_meta again. This seems rather costly and once you add more kfuncs with
>>>>>> meta data aren't you better off switching to tc(x) directly so the driver can
>>>>>> do all this natively? :/
>>>>>
>>>>> I agree that the "one kfunc per metadata item" scales poorly. IIRC, the
>>>>> hope was (back when we added the initial HW metadata support) that we
>>>>> would be able to inline them to avoid the function call overhead.
>>>>>
>>>>> That being said, even with half a dozen function calls, that's still a
>>>>> lot less overhead from going all the way to TC(x). The goal of the use
>>>>> case here is to do as little work as possible on the CPU that initially
>>>>> receives the packet, instead moving the network stack processing (and
>>>>> skb allocation) to a different CPU with cpumap.
>>>>>
>>>>> So even if the *total* amount of work being done is a bit higher because
>>>>> of the kfunc overhead, that can still be beneficial because it's split
>>>>> between two (or more) CPUs.
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm sure Jesper has some concrete benchmarks for this lying around
>>>>> somewhere, hopefully he can share those :)
>>>>
>>>> Another possible approach would be to have some utility functions (not kfuncs)
>>>> used to 'store' the hw metadata in the xdp_frame that are executed in each
>>>> driver codebase before performing XDP_REDIRECT. The downside of this approach
>>>> is we need to parse the hw metadata twice if the eBPF program that is bounded
>>>> to the NIC is consuming these info. What do you think?
>>>
>>> That's the option I was asking about. I'm assuming we should be able
>>> to reuse existing xmo metadata callbacks for this. We should be able
>>> to hide it from the drivers also hopefully.
>>
>> I'm not against this idea of transparently stores all available metadata
>> into the xdp_frame (via some flag/config), but it does not fit our
>> production use-case. I also think that this can be added later.
>>
>> We need the ability to overwrite the RX-hash value, before redirecting
>> packet to CPUMAP (remember as cover-letter describe RX-hash needed
>> *before* the GRO engine processes the packet in CPUMAP. This is before
>> TC/BPF).
>
> Make sense. Can we make GRO not flush a bucket for same_flow=0 instead?
> This will also make it work better for other regular tunneled traffic.
> Setting hash in BPF to make GRO go fast seems too implementation specific :-(

I feel misunderstood here. This was a GRO side-note to remind reviewers
that netstack expect that RX-hash isn't zero at napi_gro_receive().
This is not a make GRO faster, but a lets comply with netstack.

The important BPF optimization is the part that you forgot to quote in
the reply, so let me reproduce what I wrote below. TL;DR: RX-hash
needed to be the tunnel inner-headers else outer-headers SW hash calc
will land everything on same veth RX-queue.

On 13/06/2025 12.59, Jesper Dangaard Brouer wrote:
>
>> Our use-case for overwriting the RX-hash value is load-balancing
>> IPSEC encapsulated tunnel traffic at XDP stage via CPUMAP redirects.
>> This is generally applicable to tunneling in that we want the store
>> the RX-hash of the tunnels inner-headers. Our IPSEC use-case have a
>> variation that we only decrypt[1] the first 32 bytes to calc a LB
>> hash over inner-headers, and then redirect the original packet to
>> CPUMAP. The IPSEC packets travel into a veth device, which we
>> discovered will send everything on a single RX-queue... because
>> RX-hash (calc by netstack) will obviously use the outer-headers,
>> meaning this LB doesn't scale. >>
>> I hope this makes it clear, why we need BPF-prog ability to
>> explicitly "store" the RX-hash in the xdp-frame.