Re: [PATCH net-next v1 00/11] net: flow_dissector: opt-in byte-identical fast paths for common shapes

Thanks Willem, for the quick response and the feedback.

I think your point about where to draw the protocol boundary is a good one.

Eth + IPv4/IPv6 + TCP/UDP is clearly the common case. Beyond that, choosing
what belongs in-kernel becomes increasingly subjective: VLAN/QinQ, PPPoE,
MPLS, GRE, GTP-U, etc. all have substantial deployments, but that's also an
argument for leaving those cases to the BPF flow dissector rather than
continuing to grow a parallel parser.

On the +2500 lines, most of that isn't actually the fast-path parser:

    01  +75    gate BPF lookup behind a static key
    02  +302   Eth + IPv4/IPv6 + TCP/UDP fast path
    03  +180   + VLAN / QinQ
    04  +95    + PPPoE
    05  +103   + MPLS
    06  +134   + IP-in-IP (4in4 / 6in4 / 4in6)
    07  +121   + GRE
    08  +270   per-shape counters (/proc/net)
    09  +37    bound tunnel recursion
    10  +1102  KUnit fast/slow-path equivalence test
    11  +137   Documentation
        ------
        ~+2500

The KUnit test is therefore a large fraction of the diff. I don't want to
dismiss that as "just tests" -- it is code that has to be maintained -- but
its purpose is specifically to make maintaining two implementations safer:
the same corpus is dissected through both paths and the resulting flow_keys
are compared byte-for-byte.

More importantly, if I take your protocol-selection concern to its logical
conclusion, most of this series disappears.

A v2 could contain only:

1. the static-key optimization for the existing BPF lookup; and
2. one fast path for Eth + IPv4/IPv6 + TCP/UDP.

That is roughly:

    +377 / -50 across 5 files

plus whatever reduced KUnit coverage we decide is appropriate for that one
shape.

I think there is a useful distinction between that case and the less common
protocols. A network operator or vendor with a specialized encapsulation can
reasonably deploy a BPF flow dissector. Requiring BPF in order for ordinary
hosts to optimize the overwhelmingly common Ethernet/IP/TCP/UDP case is a
higher bar, especially since users of RPS/RFS, fq/fq_codel/cake and bonding
benefit indirectly through skb_get_hash() without necessarily knowing that
the flow dissector is involved.

The performance result is also fairly consistent across architectures. In
the isolated Eth + IPv4 + TCP benchmark the straight-line path reduced
dissection time by 47-55% across x86, ARM and RISC-V. With all shapes
compiled in, the Eth/IP path still improved the tested CPUs, although by a
wider 4.7-31.6% range.

I agree that duplicating parsing logic has a maintenance cost. The reason I
think the single common shape may still be a reasonable trade is that the
surface is small, the fast path is deliberately allowed to bail out to the
generic dissector whenever the packet doesn't match, and equivalence with the
generic path can be continuously tested rather than assumed.

For the other protocols, I've implemented the same idea as a loadable BPF
flow dissector:

https://github.com/randomizedcoder/flow_dissector_ebpf

That seems like a better home for experimenting with specialized shapes
without growing the in-kernel parser.

So rather than trying to justify seven in-kernel fast paths, I'd propose
shrinking v2 to the static-key BPF lookup optimization plus the single
Eth + IPv4/IPv6 + TCP/UDP fast path, with a correspondingly smaller
equivalence test.

Would that reduced series be worth posting for review?

Thanks,
Dave Seddon