Re: [PATCH bpf-next 1/4] xdp: Support specifying expected existing program when attaching XDP

Andrii Nakryiko
2020-03-29T20:23:30Z

On Sat, Mar 28, 2020 at 12:34 PM Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Alexei Starovoitov <alexei.starovoitov@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > On Sat, Mar 28, 2020 at 02:43:18AM +0100, Toke Høiland-Jørgensen wrote:
> >>
> >> No, I was certainly not planning to use that to teach libxdp to just
> >> nuke any bpf_link it finds attached to an interface. Quite the contrary,
> >> the point of this series is to allow libxdp to *avoid* replacing
> >> something on the interface that it didn't put there itself.
> >
> > Exactly! "that it didn't put there itself".
> > How are you going to do that?
> > I really hope you thought it through and came up with magic.
> > Because I tried and couldn't figure out how to do that with IFLA_XDP*
> > Please walk me step by step how do you think it's possible.
>
> I'm inspecting the BPF program itself to make sure it's compatible.
> Specifically, I'm embedding a piece of metadata into the program BTF,
> using Andrii's encoding trick that we also use for defining maps. So
> xdp-dispatcher.c contains this[0]:
>
> __uint(dispatcher_version, XDP_DISPATCHER_VERSION) SEC(XDP_METADATA_SECTION);
>
> and libxdp will refuse to touch any program that it finds loaded on an

But you can't say the same about other XDP applications that do not
use libxdp. So will your library come with a huge warning, e.g.:

WARNING! ANY XDP APPLICATION YOU INSTALL ON YOUR MACHINE THAT DOESN'T
USE LIBXDP WILL BREAK YOUR FIREWALLS/ROUTERS/OTHER LIBXDP
APPLICATIONS. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

So you install your libxdp-based firewalls and are happy. Then you
decide to install this awesome packet analyzer, which doesn't know
about libxdp yet. Suddenly, you get all packets analyzer, but no more
firewall, until users somehow notices that it's gone. Or firewall
periodically checks that it's still runinng. Both not great, IMO, but
might be acceptable for some users, I guess. But imagine all the
confusion for user, especially if he doesn't give a damn about XDP and
other buzzwords, but only needs a reliable firewall :) …