Re: [PATCH net-next 3/4] bpf: add support for persistent maps/progs

[Hannes Frederic Sowa]

Hi Alexei,

On Fri, Oct 16, 2015, at 18:18, Alexei Starovoitov wrote:
> On 10/16/15 3:25 AM, Hannes Frederic Sowa wrote:
> > Namespaces at some point dealt with the same problem, they nowadays use
> > bind mounts of/proc/$$/ns/* to some place in the file hierarchy to keep
> > the namespace alive. This at least allows someone to build up its own
> > hierarchy with normal unix tools and not hidden inside a C-program. For
> > filedescriptors we already have/proc/$$/fd/* but it seems that doesn't
> > work out of the box nowadays.
> 
> bind mounting of /proc/../fd was initially proposed by Andy and we've
> looked at it thoroughly, but after discussion with Eric it became
> apparent that it doesn't fit here. At the end we need shell tools
> to access maps.

Oh yes, I want shell tools for this very much! Maybe even that things
like strings, grep etc. work. :)

> Also I think you missed the hierarchy in this patch set _is_ built with
> normal 'mkdir' and files are removed with 'rm'.

I did not miss that, I am just concerned that if the kernel does not
enforce such a hierarchy automatically it won't really happen.

> The only thing that C does is BPF_PIN_FD of fd that was received from
> bpf syscall. That's way cleaner api than doing bind mount from C
> program.

I am with you there. Unfortunately we don't have a give "this fd a name"
syscalls so far so I totally understand the decision here.

> We've considered letting open() of the file return bpf specific
> anon-inode, but decided to reserve that for other more natural file
> operations. Therefore BPF_NEW_FD is needed.

Can't this be overloaded somehow. You can use mknod for creation and
open for regular file use. mknod is its own syscall.

> > I don't know in terms of how many objects bpf should be able to handle
> > and if such a bind-mount based solution would work, I guess not.
> 
> We definitely missed you at the last plumbers where it was discussed :)

Yes. :(

> > In my opinion I still favor a user space approach.
> 
> that's not acceptable for tracing use cases. No daemons allowed.

Oh, tracing does not allow daemons. Why? I can only imagine embedded
users, no?

> > Subsystems which use
> > ebpf in a way that no user space program needs to be running to control
> > them would need to export the fds by itself. E.g. something like
> > sysfs/kobject for tc? The hierarchy would then be in control of the
> > subsystem which could also create a proper naming hierarchy or maybe
> > even use an already given one. Do most other eBPF users really need to
> > persist file descriptors somewhere without user space control and pick
> > them up later?
> 
> I think it's way cleaner to have one way of solving it (like this patch
> does) instead of asking every subsystem to solve it differently.
> We've also looked at sysfs and it's ugly when it comes to removing,
> since the user cannot use normal 'rm'.

Ah, okay. Probably it would depend on some tc node always referencing
the bpf entity. But I see that sysfs might become too problematic.

Bye,
Hannes
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