Re: [PATCH v4 bpf-next 00/11] Socket migration for SO_REUSEPORT.

[Martin KaFai Lau]

On Tue, Apr 27, 2021 at 12:38:58PM -0400, Jason Baron wrote:
> 
> 
> On 4/26/21 11:46 PM, Kuniyuki Iwashima wrote:
> > The SO_REUSEPORT option allows sockets to listen on the same port and to
> > accept connections evenly. However, there is a defect in the current
> > implementation [1]. When a SYN packet is received, the connection is tied
> > to a listening socket. Accordingly, when the listener is closed, in-flight
> > requests during the three-way handshake and child sockets in the accept
> > queue are dropped even if other listeners on the same port could accept
> > such connections.
> > 
> > This situation can happen when various server management tools restart
> > server (such as nginx) processes. For instance, when we change nginx
> > configurations and restart it, it spins up new workers that respect the new
> > configuration and closes all listeners on the old workers, resulting in the
> > in-flight ACK of 3WHS is responded by RST.
> 
> Hi Kuniyuki,
> 
> I had implemented a different approach to this that I wanted to get your
> thoughts about. The idea is to use unix sockets and SCM_RIGHTS to pass the
> listen fd (or any other fd) around. Currently, if you have an 'old' webserver
> that you want to replace with a 'new' webserver, you would need a separate
> process to receive the listen fd and then have that process send the fd to
> the new webserver, if they are not running con-currently. So instead what
> I'm proposing is a 'delayed close' for a unix socket. That is, one could do:
> 
> 1) bind unix socket with path '/sockets'
> 2) sendmsg() the listen fd via the unix socket
> 2) setsockopt() some 'timeout' on the unix socket (maybe 10 seconds or so)
> 3) exit/close the old webserver and the listen socket
> 4) start the new webserver
> 5) create new unix socket and bind to '/sockets' (if has MAY_WRITE file permissions)
> 6) recvmsg() the listen fd
> 
> So the idea is that we set a timeout on the unix socket. If the new process
> does not start and bind to the unix socket, it simply closes, thus releasing
> the listen socket. However, if it does bind it can now call recvmsg() and
> use the listen fd as normal. It can then simply continue to use the old listen
> fds and/or create new ones and drain the old ones.
> 
> Thus, the old and new webservers do not have to run concurrently. This doesn't
> involve any changes to the tcp layer and can be used to pass any type of fd.
> not sure if it's actually useful for anything else though.
We also used to do tcp-listen(/udp) fd transfer because the new process can not
bind to the same IP:PORT in the old kernel without SO_REUSEPORT.  Some of the
services listen to many different IP:PORT(s).  Transferring all of them
was ok-ish but the old and new process do not necessary listen to the same set
of IP:PORT(s) (e.g. the config may have changed during restart) and it further
complicates the fd transfer logic in the userspace.

It was then moved to SO_REUSEPORT.  The new process can create its listen fds
without depending on the old process.  It pretty much starts as if there is
no old process.  There is no need to transfer the fds, simplified the userspace
logic.  The old and new process can work independently.  The old and new process
still run concurrently for a brief time period to avoid service disruption.