Message-ID: <CAKH8qBueYgpxQTvTwngOs6RNjy9yvLF92s1p5nFrobw_UprNMQ@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2023 15:32:22 -0800
From: Stanislav Fomichev <sdf@...gle.com>
To: Willem de Bruijn <willemdebruijn.kernel@...il.com>
Cc: Mina Almasry <almasrymina@...gle.com>, netdev@...r.kernel.org, 
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-arch@...r.kernel.org, 
	linux-kselftest@...r.kernel.org, linux-media@...r.kernel.org, 
	dri-devel@...ts.freedesktop.org, linaro-mm-sig@...ts.linaro.org, 
	"David S. Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>, Eric Dumazet <edumazet@...gle.com>, 
	Jakub Kicinski <kuba@...nel.org>, Paolo Abeni <pabeni@...hat.com>, 
	Jesper Dangaard Brouer <hawk@...nel.org>, Ilias Apalodimas <ilias.apalodimas@...aro.org>, 
	Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...db.de>, David Ahern <dsahern@...nel.org>, Shuah Khan <shuah@...nel.org>, 
	Sumit Semwal <sumit.semwal@...aro.org>, Christian König <christian.koenig@....com>, 
	Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@...gle.com>, Jeroen de Borst <jeroendb@...gle.com>, 
	Praveen Kaligineedi <pkaligineedi@...gle.com>, Willem de Bruijn <willemb@...gle.com>, 
	Kaiyuan Zhang <kaiyuanz@...gle.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v3 10/12] tcp: RX path for devmem TCP

On Mon, Nov 6, 2023 at 2:56 PM Willem de Bruijn
<willemdebruijn.kernel@...il.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Nov 6, 2023 at 2:34 PM Stanislav Fomichev <sdf@...gle.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 11/06, Willem de Bruijn wrote:
> > > > > IMHO, we need a better UAPI to receive the tokens and give them back to
> > > > > the kernel. CMSG + setsockopt(SO_DEVMEM_DONTNEED) get the job done,
> > > > > but look dated and hacky :-(
> > > > >
> > > > > We should either do some kind of user/kernel shared memory queue to
> > > > > receive/return the tokens (similar to what Jonathan was doing in his
> > > > > proposal?)
> > > >
> > > > I'll take a look at Jonathan's proposal, sorry, I'm not immediately
> > > > familiar but I wanted to respond :-) But is the suggestion here to
> > > > build a new kernel-user communication channel primitive for the
> > > > purpose of passing the information in the devmem cmsg? IMHO that seems
> > > > like an overkill. Why add 100-200 lines of code to the kernel to add
> > > > something that can already be done with existing primitives? I don't
> > > > see anything concretely wrong with cmsg & setsockopt approach, and if
> > > > we switch to something I'd prefer to switch to an existing primitive
> > > > for simplicity?
> > > >
> > > > The only other existing primitive to pass data outside of the linear
> > > > buffer is the MSG_ERRQUEUE that is used for zerocopy. Is that
> > > > preferred? Any other suggestions or existing primitives I'm not aware
> > > > of?
> > > >
> > > > > or bite the bullet and switch to io_uring.
> > > > >
> > > >
> > > > IMO io_uring & socket support are orthogonal, and one doesn't preclude
> > > > the other. As you know we like to use sockets and I believe there are
> > > > issues with io_uring adoption at Google that I'm not familiar with
> > > > (and could be wrong). I'm interested in exploring io_uring support as
> > > > a follow up but I think David Wei will be interested in io_uring
> > > > support as well anyway.
> > >
> > > I also disagree that we need to replace a standard socket interface
> > > with something "faster", in quotes.
> > >
> > > This interface is not the bottleneck to the target workload.
> > >
> > > Replacing the synchronous sockets interface with something more
> > > performant for workloads where it is, is an orthogonal challenge.
> > > However we do that, I think that traditional sockets should continue
> > > to be supported.
> > >
> > > The feature may already even work with io_uring, as both recvmsg with
> > > cmsg and setsockopt have io_uring support now.
> >
> > I'm not really concerned with faster. I would prefer something cleaner :-)
> >
> > Or maybe we should just have it documented. With some kind of path
> > towards beautiful world where we can create dynamic queues..
>
> I suppose we just disagree on the elegance of the API.

Yeah, I might be overly sensitive to the apis that use get/setsockopt
for something more involved than setting a flag.
Probably because I know that bpf will (unnecessarily) trigger on these :-D
I had to implement that bpf "bypass" (or fastpath) for
TCP_ZEROCOPY_RECEIVE and it looks like this token recycle might also
benefit from something similar.

> The concise notification API returns tokens as a range for
> compression, encoding as two 32-bit unsigned integers start + length.
> It allows for even further batching by returning multiple such ranges
> in a single call.

Tangential: should tokens be u64? Otherwise we can't have more than
4gb unacknowledged. Or that's a reasonable constraint?


> This is analogous to the MSG_ZEROCOPY notification mechanism from
> kernel to user.
>
> The synchronous socket syscall interface can be replaced by something
> asynchronous like io_uring. This already works today? Whatever
> asynchronous ring-based API would be selected, io_uring or otherwise,
> I think the concise notification encoding would remain as is.
>
> Since this is an operation on a socket, I find a setsockopt the
> fitting interface.

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