Re: INFO: rcu detected stall in xfrm_hash_rebuild

[Christophe Gouault]

Le ven. 14 dÃc. 2018 Ã 15:35, Florian Westphal <fw@xxxxxxxxx> a Ãcrit :
> Ok.  An alternative would be to remove the support for
> policy hash table thresholds (which decide what kinds of policies
> go to exact table and which ones go into inexact ones), i.e.
> partially revert 880a6fab8f6ba5b5abe59ea6
> ("xfrm: configure policy hash table thresholds by netlink").
>
> This would remove the need for the rehashing support that
> re-sorts the policies into either exact/inexact lists) when the
> those tunables are changed.
>
> We could also easily convert the exact table to an rhashtable
> then if we wanted to.
>
> I guess we should probably wait to get some operational feedback on the
> inexact storage first to see if it really improves things enough to
> make threshold tuning unneccessary.
>
> Christophe, whats your take?

Hi Florian,

The main use cases I have encountered and tried to address with the
hash-based lookup were network operator use cases:
- a lot of dynamic /32 <=> /32 policies (protecting GTP tunnels)
- or a lot of dynamic policies with the same prefix lengths (e.g. /16 <=> /24)
and a few non-hashed policies stored in the linked list.

This solutions gives good performance for both lookup *and*
configuration with a big number of SPs. The lookup time is essential,
but so is the IKE negotiation rate. And the configuration time has a
direct impact on it.

I have not yet had time to benchmark the new tree-based implementation.

Could you verify how the configuration time would behave in such use
cases if the hash-based lookup was replaced by a tree-based lookup?

Regards
Christophe