Re: [PATCH v4 net-next 7/9] net: ipv4: listified version of ip_rcv

[Pablo Neira Ayuso <pablo@netfilter.org>]

On Mon, Jul 02, 2018 at 04:14:12PM +0100, Edward Cree wrote:
> Also involved adding a way to run a netfilter hook over a list of packets.
>  Rather than attempting to make netfilter know about lists (which would be
>  a major project in itself) we just let it call the regular okfn (in this
>  case ip_rcv_finish()) for any packets it steals, and have it give us back
>  a list of packets it's synchronously accepted (which normally NF_HOOK
>  would automatically call okfn() on, but we want to be able to potentially
>  pass the list to a listified version of okfn().)
> The netfilter hooks themselves are indirect calls that still happen per-
>  packet (see nf_hook_entry_hookfn()), but again, changing that can be left
>  for future work.
> 
> There is potential for out-of-order receives if the netfilter hook ends up
>  synchronously stealing packets, as they will be processed before any
>  accepts earlier in the list.  However, it was already possible for an
>  asynchronous accept to cause out-of-order receives, so presumably this is
>  considered OK.

I think we can simplify things if these chained packets don't follow
the standard forwarding path, this would require to revisit many
subsystems to handle these new chained packets - potentially a lot of
work and likely breaking many things - and I would expect we (and
other subsystems too) will not get very much benefits from these
chained packets.

In general I like this infrastructure, but I think we can get
something simpler if we combine it with the flowtable idea, so chained
packets follow the non-standard flowtable forwarding path as described
in [1].

We could generalize and place the flowtable code in the core if
needed, and make it not netfilter dependent if that's a problem.

Thanks.

[1] https://marc.info/?l=netfilter-devel&m=152898601419841&w=2