Thread (19 messages) 19 messages, 6 authors, 2020-08-20

Re: Packet gets stuck in NOLOCK pfifo_fast qdisc

From: Jonas Bonn <hidden>
Date: 2019-10-10 06:28:03
Also in: lkml

Hi Paolo,

On 09/10/2019 21:14, Paolo Abeni wrote:
On Wed, 2019-10-09 at 08:46 +0200, Jonas Bonn wrote:
quoted
Hi,

The lockless pfifo_fast qdisc has an issue with packets getting stuck in
the queue.  What appears to happen is:

i)  Thread 1 holds the 'seqlock' on the qdisc and dequeues packets.
ii)  Thread 1 dequeues the last packet in the queue.
iii)  Thread 1 iterates through the qdisc->dequeue function again and
determines that the queue is empty.

iv)  Thread 2 queues up a packet.  Since 'seqlock' is busy, it just
assumes the packet will be dequeued by whoever is holding the lock.

v)  Thread 1 releases 'seqlock'.

After v), nobody will check if there are packets in the queue until a
new packet is enqueued.  Thereby, the packet enqueued by Thread 2 may be
delayed indefinitely.
I think you are right.

It looks like this possible race is present since the initial lockless
implementation - commit 6b3ba9146fe6 ("net: sched: allow qdiscs to
handle locking")

Anyhow the racing windows looks quite tiny - I never observed that
issue in my tests. Do you have a working reproducer?
Yes, it's reliably reproducible.  We do network latency measurements and 
latency spikes for these packets that get stuck in the queue.
Something alike the following code - completely untested - can possibly
address the issue, but it's a bit rough and I would prefer not adding
additonal complexity to the lockless qdiscs, can you please have a spin
a it?
Your change looks reasonable.  I'll give it a try.

quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
Thanks,

Paolo
---
diff --git a/include/net/pkt_sched.h b/include/net/pkt_sched.h
index 6a70845bd9ab..65a1c03330d6 100644
--- a/include/net/pkt_sched.h
+++ b/include/net/pkt_sched.h
@@ -113,18 +113,23 @@ bool sch_direct_xmit(struct sk_buff *skb, struct Qdisc *q,
  		     struct net_device *dev, struct netdev_queue *txq,
  		     spinlock_t *root_lock, bool validate);
  
-void __qdisc_run(struct Qdisc *q);
+int __qdisc_run(struct Qdisc *q);
  
  static inline void qdisc_run(struct Qdisc *q)
  {
+	int quota = 0;
+
  	if (qdisc_run_begin(q)) {
  		/* NOLOCK qdisc must check 'state' under the qdisc seqlock
  		 * to avoid racing with dev_qdisc_reset()
  		 */
  		if (!(q->flags & TCQ_F_NOLOCK) ||
  		    likely(!test_bit(__QDISC_STATE_DEACTIVATED, &q->state)))
-			__qdisc_run(q);
+			quota = __qdisc_run(q);
  		qdisc_run_end(q);
+
+		if (quota > 0 && q->flags & TCQ_F_NOLOCK && q->ops->peek(q))
+			__netif_schedule(q);
Not sure this is relevant, but there's a subtle difference in the way 
that the underlying ptr_ring peeks at the queue head and checks whether 
the queue is empty.

For peek it's:

READ_ONCE(r->queue[r->consumer_head]);

For is_empty it's:

!r->queue[READ_ONCE(r->consumer_head)];

The placement of the READ_ONCE changes here.  I can't get my head around 
whether this difference is significant or not.  If it is, then perhaps 
an is_empty() method is needed on the qdisc_ops...???

/Jonas
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