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

[Kuniyuki Iwashima]

From:   Jason Baron <jbaron@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date:   Tue, 27 Apr 2021 12:38:58 -0400
> 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.
> 
> I'm not sure if this solves your use-case or not but I thought I'd share it.
> One can also inherit the fds like in systemd's socket activation model, but
> that again requires another process to hold open the listen fd.

Thank you for sharing code.

It seems bit more crash-tolerant than normal fd passing, but it can still
suffer if the process dies before passing fds. With this patch set, we can
migrate children sockets even if the process dies.

Also, as Martin said, fd passing tends to make application complicated.

If we do not mind these points, your approach could be an option.


> 
> I have a very rough patch (emphasis on rough), that implements this idea that
> I'm attaching below to explain it better. It would need a bunch of fixups and
> it's against an older kernel, but hopefully gives this direction a better
> explanation.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -Jason