Date:   Tue, 27 Sep 2022 13:12:13 -0400
From:   Willem de Bruijn <willemdebruijn.kernel@...il.com>
To:     Adel Abouchaev <adel.abushaev@...il.com>
Cc:     Willem de Bruijn <willemdebruijn.kernel@...il.com>,
        Xin Long <lucien.xin@...il.com>,
        Jakub Kicinski <kuba@...nel.org>, davem <davem@...emloft.net>,
        Eric Dumazet <edumazet@...gle.com>,
        Paolo Abeni <pabeni@...hat.com>,
        Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>,
        David Ahern <dsahern@...nel.org>, shuah@...nel.org,
        imagedong@...cent.com, network dev <netdev@...r.kernel.org>,
        linux-doc@...r.kernel.org, linux-kselftest@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [net-next v2 0/6] net: support QUIC crypto

On Tue, Sep 27, 2022 at 12:45 PM Adel Abouchaev <adel.abushaev@...il.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 9/25/22 11:04 AM, Willem de Bruijn wrote:
> >>> The patch seems to get the crypto_ctx by doing a connection hash table
> >>> lookup in the sendmsg(), which is not good from the performance side.
> >>> One QUIC connection can go over multiple UDP sockets, but I don't
> >>> think one socket can be used by multiple QUIC connections. So why not
> >>> save the ctx in the socket instead?
> >> A single socket could have multiple connections originated from it,
> >> having different destinations, if the socket is not connected. An
> >> optimization could be made for connected sockets to cache the context
> >> and save time on a lookup. The measurement of kernel operations timing
> >> did not reveal a significant amount of time spent in this lookup due to
> >> a relatively small number of connections per socket in general. A shared
> >> table across multiple sockets might experience a different performance
> >> grading.
> > I'm late to this patch series, sorry. High quality implementation. I
> > have a few design questions similar to Xin.
> >
> > If multiplexing, instead of looking up a connection by { address, port
> > variable length connection ID }, perhaps return a connection table
> > index on setsockopt and use that in sendmsg.
>
>
> It was deliberate to not to return anything other than 0 from
> setsockopt() as defined in the spec for the function. Despite that it
> says "shall", the doc says that 0 is the only value for successful
> operation. This was the reason not to use setsockopt() for any
> bidirectional transfers of data and or status. A more sophisticated
> approach with netlink sockets would be more suitable for it. The second
> reason is the API asymmetry for Tx and Rx which will be introduced - the

I thought the cover letter indicated that due to asymmetry of most
QUIC workloads, only Tx offload is implemented. You do intend to add
Rx later?

> Rx will still need to match on the address, port and cid. The third
> reason is that in current implementations there are no more than a few
> connections per socket,

This is very different from how we do QUIC at Google. There we
definitely multiplex many connections across essentially a socket per
CPU IIRC.

> which does not abuse the rhashtable that does a
> lookup, although it takes time to hash the key into a hash for a seek.
> The performance measurement ran against the runtime and did not flag
> this path as underperforming either, there were other parts that
> substantially add to the runtime, not the key lookup though.
>
>
> >>> The patch is to reduce the copying operations between user space and
> >>> the kernel. I might miss something in your user space code, but the
> >>> msg to send is *already packed* into the Stream Frame in user space,
> >>> what's the difference if you encrypt it in userspace and then
> >>> sendmsg(udp_sk) with zero-copy to the kernel.
> >> It is possible to do it this way. Zero-copy works best with packet sizes
> >> starting at 32K and larger.  Anything less than that would consume the
> >> improvements of zero-copy by zero-copy pre/post operations and needs to
> >> align memory.
> > Part of the cost of MSG_ZEROCOPY is in mapping and unmapping user
> > pages. This series re-implements that with its own get_user_pages.
> > That is duplicative non-trivial code. And it will incur the same cost.
> > What this implementation saves is the (indeed non-trivial)
> > asynchronous completion notification over the error queue.
> >
> > The cover letter gives some performance numbers against a userspace
> > implementation that has to copy from user to kernel. It might be more
> > even to compare against an implementation using MSG_ZEROCOPY and
> > UDP_SEGMENT. A userspace crypto implementation may have other benefits
> > compared to a kernel implementation, such as not having to convert to
> > crypto API scatter-gather arrays and back to network structures.
> >
> > A few related points
> >
> > - The implementation support multiplexed connections, but only one
> > crypto sendmsg can be outstanding at any time:
> >
> >    + /**
> >    + * To synchronize concurrent sendmsg() requests through the same socket
> >    + * and protect preallocated per-context memory.
> >    + **/
> >    + struct mutex sendmsg_mux;
> >
> > That is quite limiting for production workloads.
>
> The use case that we have with MVFST library currently runs a single
> worker for a connection and has a single socket attached to it. QUIC
> allows simultaneous use of multiple connection IDs to swap them in
> runtime, and implementation would request only a handful of these. The
> MVFST batches writes into a block of about 8Kb and then uses GSO to send
> them all at once.
>
> > - Crypto operations are also executed synchronously, using
> > crypto_wait_req after each operationn. This limits throughput by using
> > at most one core per UDP socket. And adds sendmsg latency (which may
> > or may not be important to the application). Wireguard shows an
> > example of how to parallelize software crypto across cores.
> >
> > - The implementation avoids dynamic allocation of cipher text pages by
> > using a single ctx->cipher_page. This is protected by sendmsg_mux (see
> > above). Is that safe when packets leave the protocol stack and are
> > then held in a qdisc or when being processed by the NIC?
> > quic_sendmsg_locked will return, but the cipher page is not free to
> > reuse yet.
> There is currently no use case that we have in hands that requires
> parallel transmission of data for the same connection. Multiple
> connections would have no issue running in parallel as each of them will
> have it's own preallocated cipher_page in the context.

This still leaves the point that sendmsg may return and the mutex
released while the cipher_page is still associated with an skb in the
transmit path.

> There is a fragmentation further down the stack with
> ip_generic_getfrag() that eventually does copy_from_iter() and makea a
> copy of the data. This is executed as part of __ip_append_data() called
> from udp_sendmsg() in ipv4/udp.c. The assumption was that this is
> executed synchronously and the queues and NIC will see a mapping of a
> different memory area than the ciphertext in the pre-allocated page.
>
> >
> > - The real benefit of kernel QUIC will come from HW offload. Would it
> > be better to avoid the complexity of an in-kernel software
> > implementation and only focus on HW offload? Basically, pass the
> > plaintext QUIC packets over a standard UDP socket and alongside in a
> > cmsg pass either an index into a HW security association database or
> > the immediate { key, iv } connection_info (for stateless sockets), to
> > be encoded into the descriptor by the device driver.
> Hardware usually targets a single ciphersuite such as AES-GCM-128/256,
> while QUIC also supports Chacha20-Poly1305 and AES-CCM. The generalized
> support for offload prompted implementation of these ciphers in kernel
> code.

All userspace libraries also support all protocols as fall-back. No
need for two fall-backs if HW support is missing?

> The kernel code could also engage if the future hardware has
> capacity caps preventing it from handling all requests in the hardware.
> > - With such a simpler path, could we avoid introducing ULP and just
> > have udp [gs]etsockopt CRYPTO_STATE. Where QUIC is the only defined
> > state type yet.
> >
> > - Small aside: as the series introduces new APIs with non-trivial
> > parsing in the kernel, it's good to run a fuzzer like syzkaller on it
> > (if not having done so yet).
> Agreed.
> >> The other possible obstacle would be that eventual support
> >> of QUIC encryption and decryption in hardware would integrate well with
> >> this current approach.
> >>> Didn't really understand the "GSO" you mentioned, as I don't see any
> >>> code about kernel GSO, I guess it's just "Fragment size", right?
> >>> BTW, it‘s not common to use "//" for the kernel annotation.
> > minor point: fragment has meaning in IPv4. For GSO, prefer gso_size.
> Sure, will change it to gso_size.
> >
> >> Once the payload arrives into the kernel, the GSO on the interface would
> >> instruct L3/L4 stack on fragmentation. In this case, the plaintext QUIC
> >> packets should be aligned on the GSO marks less the tag size that would
> >> be added by encryption. For GSO size 1000, the QUIC packets in the batch
> >> for transmission should all be 984 bytes long, except maybe the last
> >> one. Once the tag is attached, the new size of 1000 will correctly split
> >> the QUIC packets further down the stack for transmission in individual
> >> IP/UDP packets. The code is also saving processing time by sending all
> >> packets at once to UDP in a single call, when GSO is enabled.
> >>> I'm not sure if it's worth adding a ULP layer over UDP for this QUIC
> >>> TX only. Honestly, I'm more supporting doing a full QUIC stack in the
> >>> kernel independently with socket APIs to use it:
> >>> https://github.com/lxin/tls_hs.
> >>>
> >>> Thanks.

Powered by blists - more mailing lists