Message-Id: <2125A434-6529-4D5A-BA6B-9F64C6B7A8C0@cumulusnetworks.com>
Date:	Thu, 27 Aug 2015 14:02:05 -0700
From:	Nikolay Aleksandrov <nikolay@...ulusnetworks.com>
To:	roopa <roopa@...ulusnetworks.com>
Cc:	David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>, netdev@...r.kernel.org,
	vyasevic@...hat.com, toshiaki.makita1@...il.com,
	stephen@...workplumber.org, bridge@...ts.linux-foundation.org,
	wkok@...ulusnetworks.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next v2] bridge: vlan: allow to suppress local mac install for all vlans


> On Aug 26, 2015, at 9:57 PM, roopa <roopa@...ulusnetworks.com> wrote:
> 
> On 8/26/15, 4:33 AM, Nikolay Aleksandrov wrote:
>>> On Aug 25, 2015, at 11:06 PM, David Miller <davem@...emloft.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> From: Nikolay Aleksandrov <nikolay@...ulusnetworks.com>
>>> Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2015 22:28:16 -0700
>>> 
>>>> Certainly, that should be done and I will look into it, but the
>>>> essence of this patch is a bit different. The problem here is not
>>>> the size of the fdb entries, it’s more the number of them - having
>>>> 96000 entries (even if they were 1 byte ones) is just way too much
>>>> especially when the fdb hash size is small and static. We could work
>>>> on making it dynamic though, but still these type of local entries
>>>> per vlan per port can easily be avoided with this option.
>>> 96000 bits can be stored in 12k.  Get where I'm going with this?
>>> 
>>> Look at the problem sideways.
>> Oh okay, I misunderstood your previous comment. I’ll look into that.
>> 
> I just wanted to add the other problems we have had with keeping these macs (mostly from userspace POV):
> - add/del netlink notification storms
> - and large netlink dumps
> 
> In addition to in-kernel optimizations, will be nice to have a solution that reduces the burden on userspace. That will need a newer netlink dump format for fdbs. Considering all the changes needed, Nikolays patch seems less intrusive.

Right, we need to take these into account as well. I’ll continue the discussion on this (or restart it) because
I looked into using a bitmap for the local entries only and while it fixes the scalability issue, it presents
a few new ones which are mostly related to the fact that these entries now exist only without a vlan
and if a new mac comes along which matches one of these but is in a vlan, the entry will get created
in br_fdb_update() unless we add a second lookup, but that will slow down the learning path.
Also this change requires an update of every fdb function that uses the vid as a key (every fdb function?!)
because now we can have the mac in two places instead of one which is a pretty big churn with lots
of conditionals all over the place and I don’t like it. Adding this complexity for the local addresses only
seems like an overkill, so I think to drop this issue for now.
This patch (that works around the initial problem) also has these issues.
Note that one way to take care of this in a more straight-forward way would be to have each entry
with some sort of a bitmap (like Vlad has tried earlier) and then we can combine the paths so most
of these issues disappear, but that will not be easy as was already commented earlier. I’ve looked
briefly into doing this with rhashtable so we can keep the memory footprint for each entry relatively
small but it still affects the performance and we can have thousands of resizes happening. 

On the notification side if we can fix that, we can actually delete the 96000 entries without creating a
huge notification storm and do a user-land workaround of the original issue, so I’ll look into that next.

Any comments or ideas are very welcome.

Thank you,
 Nik

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