Re: [PATCH net-next v2 5/9] selftests: hsr: Add tests for more link faults with PRP
From: Felix Maurer <hidden>
Date: 2026-02-03 12:09:53
On Mon, Feb 02, 2026 at 05:45:50PM +0100, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:
quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
On 2026-02-02 12:30:44 [+0100], Felix Maurer wrote:quoted
On Thu, Jan 29, 2026 at 02:32:17PM +0100, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior wrote:quoted
On 2026-01-22 15:57:00 [+0100], Felix Maurer wrote:quoted
Add tests where one link has different rates of packet loss or reorders packets. PRP should still be able to recover from these link faults and show no packet loss. However, it is acceptable to receive some level of duplicate packets. This matches the current specification (IEC 62439-3:2021) of the duplicate discard algorithm that requires it to be "designed such that it never rejects a legitimate frame, while occasional acceptance of a duplicate can be tolerated." The rate of acceptable duplicates in this test is intentionally high (10%) to make the test stable, the values I observed in the worst test cases (20% loss) are around 5% duplicates.Do you know why we have the duplicates? It is because of the high sending rate at which point the blocks are dropped and we can't recognise the duplicate?I could not give a definitive answer on this last week, I had to dig a bit and think through this. The reason for the duplicates is not a high sending rate leading to dropped blocks. Rather, it's the low sending rate leading to expiring blocks: in the test, the ping interval is set to 10ms. As the blocks expire based on the timestamp of the first received sequence number, the 400ms entry expiry gets hit every ca. 40 frames, at which we basically clear all received sequence number in the block by creating a new block. This happens on both nodes (for ping requests and replies) ca. 10 times during the test, leading to about 20 duplicate packets, which is the ca. 5% duplicates I observed in multiple runs of this test. This means the duplicate rate is highly dependent on the traffic pattern and the test manages to hit exactly this situation. I'll add the explanation to the message in v3. If similar traffic patterns are hit in the real world too often, we could test different block sizes. I just did this and the results are as expected: - 64 bit blocks: the duplicate rate is about the same because the block still expires once. - 32 bit blocks: the duplicate rate drops to around 4% because, including the netem delay in the test, this is roughly the edge between expiring a block and already hitting a new one. But if we keep the bitmap as it is, we waste 50% of memory. - 16 bit blocks: duplicate rate is zero because we use new blocks way before the expiry time. But this wastes about 75% memory for each block and the overhead of the timestamp in each block gets quite significant. I'd suggest to keep the 128 bit blocks to have a chance to detect duplicates at higher data rates for some delay difference (up to about 5.5ms with 1Gbit/s). 64 bit blocks would halve the maximum delay difference, but probably still strike a good balance between memory overhead and duplicate rate. Do you prefer one over the other?We had false positives with the old algorithm so having now some is not the end of the world. 128bit blocks are fine I guess. The question is how far do we want to tune it and everything comes with a price. If I update bitmap every time there is a valid packet:diff --git a/net/hsr/hsr_framereg.c b/net/hsr/hsr_framereg.c index 08f91f10a9347..bb9b13940c35b 100644 --- a/net/hsr/hsr_framereg.c +++ b/net/hsr/hsr_framereg.c@@ -572,6 +572,7 @@ static int hsr_check_duplicate(struct hsr_frame_info *frame, if (test_and_set_bit(seq_bit, block->seq_nrs[port_type])) goto out_seen; + block->time = jiffies; out_new: spin_unlock_bh(&node->seq_out_lock); return 0;then I the test | TEST: test_cut_link - HSRv1 [ OK ] | INFO: Wait for node table entries to be merged. | INFO: Running ping node1-NUb1aJ -> 100.64.0.2 | INFO: 400 packets transmitted, 400 received, +22 duplicates, 0% packet loss, time 6113ms turns into | TEST: test_cut_link - HSRv1 [ OK ] | INFO: Wait for node table entries to be merged. | INFO: Running ping node1-6i4xNe -> 100.64.0.2 | INFO: 400 packets transmitted, 400 received, 0% packet loss, time 6067ms which could be considered as an improvement.
Thank you for testing this! That's indeed an improvement.
On the other hand the live time of the block gets pushed past the HSR_ENTRY_FORGET_TIME so the first entry survives longer theoretically 127 * (400-1) = ~50 seconds. In the reboot case the box should be quiet for 500ms at which point the entry gets removed anyway so the longer "hold time" shouldn't matter. It sounds like a good idea but I don't want to rush anything ;)
I agree, the reboot case is safe because of the 500ms quiet period. But I kinda fear a situation where a node sends a lot of packets (making it's sequence number wrap within the 400ms), but only a small fraction of that to us, so that we don't clear blocks because of a full buffer. That could make a block live pretty long, when we hit it multiple times, which could in turn lead to valid, new frames being dropped. I'd say it's a somewhat artificial scenario, but not impossible in reality (especially considering that I'd expect a good chunk of the traffic in HSR and PRP networks being periodic, which may lead to reliably hitting the same blocks over and over). Thanks, Felix