Re: [PATCH iproute2] lib/libnetlink: ensure a minimum of 32KB for the buffer used in rtnl_recvmsg()

[David Ahern <dsahern@gmail.com>]

On 2/14/19 6:49 AM, Michal Kubecek wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 12, 2019 at 07:04:17PM -0700, David Ahern wrote:
>>
>> Do we know of any single message sizes > 32k? 2d34851cd341 cites
>> increasing VF's but at some point there is a limit. If not, the whole
>> PEEK thing should go away and we just malloc 32k (or 64k) buffers for
>> each recvmsg.
> 
> IFLA_VF_LIST is by far the biggest thing I have seen so far. I don't
> remember exact numbers but the issue with 32KB buffer (for the whole
> RTM_NELINK message) was encountered by some of our customers with NICs
> having 120 or 128 VFs.
> 
> There is a bigger issue with IFLA_VFINFO_LIST, though, as it's an
> attribute so that netlink limits its size to 64 KB. IIRC with current
> size of IFLA_VF_INFO this would be reached with 270-280 VFs (I'm sure
> the number was higer than 256 but not too much higher.)
> 
> This would mean unless we let something else grow too much, the whole
> message shouldn't get much bigger than 64 KB. And if we can find some
> other solution (e.g. passing VF information in separate messages if
> client declares support), even 32 KB would be more than enough.

That's what I was asking, thanks. So 32kB today is sufficient, 64kB has
future buffer. So this whole PEEK and allocate the message size is
overkill. It could just as easily been bumped from 32kB to 64kB in the
original patch and been good for a while.