Date:   Sun, 17 Feb 2019 14:03:40 -0800
From:   Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@...il.com>
To:     Russell King - ARM Linux admin <linux@...linux.org.uk>
Cc:     Andrew Lunn <andrew@...n.ch>,
        Vivien Didelot <vivien.didelot@...il.com>,
        "David S. Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>, netdev@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next 3/3] net: dsa: mv88e6xxx: defautl to multicast
 and unicast flooding



On 2/17/2019 1:58 PM, Russell King - ARM Linux admin wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 17, 2019 at 01:45:24PM -0800, Florian Fainelli wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 2/17/2019 8:34 AM, Russell King - ARM Linux admin wrote:
>>> On Sun, Feb 17, 2019 at 02:27:16PM +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux admin wrote:
>>>> On Sun, Feb 17, 2019 at 02:25:17PM +0000, Russell King wrote:
>>>>> Switches work by learning the MAC address for each attached station by
>>>>> monitoring traffic from each station.  When a station sends a packet,
>>>>> the switch records which port the MAC address is connected to.
>>>>>
>>>>> With IPv4 networking, before communication commences with a neighbour,
>>>>> an ARP packet is broadcasted to all stations asking for the MAC address
>>>>> corresponding with the IPv4.  The desired station responds with an ARP
>>>>> reply, and the ARP reply causes the switch to learn which port the
>>>>> station is connected to.
>>>>>
>>>>> With IPv6 networking, the situation is rather different.  Rather than
>>>>> broadcasting ARP packets, a "neighbour solicitation" is multicasted
>>>>> rather than broadcasted.  This multicast needs to reach the intended
>>>>> station in order for the neighbour to be discovered.
>>>>>
>>>>> Once a neighbour has been discovered, and entered into the sending
>>>>> stations neighbour cache, communication can restart at a point later
>>>>> without sending a new neighbour solicitation, even if the entry in
>>>>> the neighbour cache is marked as stale.  This can be after the MAC
>>>>> address has expired from the forwarding cache of the DSA switch -
>>>>> when that occurs, there is a long pause in communication.
>>>>>
>>>>> Our DSA implementation for mv88e6xxx switches has defaulted to having
>>>>> multicast and unicast flooding disabled.  As per the above description,
>>>>> this is fine for IPv4 networking, since the broadcasted ARP queries
>>>>> will be sent to and received by all stations on the same network.
>>>>> However, this breaks IPv6 very badly - blocking neighbour solicitations
>>>>> and later causing connections to stall.
>>>>>
>>>>> The defaults that the Linux bridge code expect from bridges are that
>>>>> unknown unicast frames and unknown multicast frames are flooded to
>>>>> all stations, which is at odds to the defaults adopted by our DSA
>>>>> implementation for mv88e6xxx switches.
>>>>>
>>>>> This commit enables by default flooding of both unknown unicast and
>>>>> unknown multicast frames.  This means that mv88e6xxx DSA switches now
>>>>> behave as per the bridge(8) man page, and IPv6 works flawlessly through
>>>>> such a switch.
>>>>
>>>> Note that there is the open question whether this affects the case where
>>>> each port is used as a separate network interface: that case has not yet
>>>> been tested.
>>>
>>> I've checked with a mv88e6131 on the clearfog gt8k board.  lan1
>>> connected to my lan with plenty of traffic on, and configured as
>>> part of a bridge.  lan2 connected to the zii board, but not part
>>> of the bridge.  Monitoring lan2 from the zii board shows no traffic
>>> that was received from lan1.
>>>
>>> So it looks fine.
>>
>> With the current state whereby we do not have the necessary hooks to
>> perform filtering on non-bridged/standalone ports, this is entirely fine
>> indeed.
>>
>> In the future this is part of something I want to address because it is
>> IMHO highly undesirable to have non-bridged ports be flooded with
>> unknown multicast or unknown unicast for that matter because that makes
>> them deviate from a standard NIC interface. Unknown unicast is not
>> necessarily a low hanging fruit, but still, if we have switches capable
>> of filtering, we might as well make use of that. Of course, one
>> difficulty is that we must not break running tcpdump on those DSA slave
>> network interfaces.
> 
> Sorry, I think you have the wrong end of the stick.
> 
> For a non-bridged port, I am seeing _no_ traffic apart from that
> explicitly sent out through that port.  In other words, there are
> _no_ flooded frames coming out of the non-bridged port.
> 
> This patch appears to have no material effect on non-bridged ports.

Presumably because that non-bridged port and the CPU port are part of
the same domain with only those 2 ports and that is what we want.

Now what happens if say you have a station that sends multicast traffic
through that port to e.g.: 226.94.1.1, I bet that port happily sends
that multicast traffic to the CPU port with no filtering what so ever
and this ends-up being dropped in the network stack because there is a
socket look up failure there. IMHO unless you have a receiver/server on
that network interface on the DSA network interface and a matching
socket you should not be receiving that multicast traffic and the switch
should be filtering it. Since the network stack will call into
ndo_set_rx_mode() for those cases, we really just need to make that
multicast traffic known, instead of unknown to the switch.
-- 
Florian

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