Re: [PATCH v6 net-next] net-core: add InMacErrors counter

[Eric Dumazet]

On Wed, Feb 2, 2022 at 8:59 PM Jakub Kicinski <kuba@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Tue,  1 Feb 2022 22:28:45 +0000 Jeffrey Ji wrote:
> > From: jeffreyji <jeffreyji@xxxxxxxxxx>
> >
> > Increment InMacErrors counter when packet dropped due to incorrect dest
> > MAC addr.
> >
> > An example when this drop can occur is when manually crafting raw
> > packets that will be consumed by a user space application via a tap
> > device. For testing purposes local traffic was generated using trafgen
> > for the client and netcat to start a server
> >
> > example output from nstat:
> > \~# nstat -a | grep InMac
> > Ip6InMacErrors                  0                  0.0
> > IpExtInMacErrors                1                  0.0
>
> I had another thing and this still doesn't sit completely well
> with me :(
>
> Shouldn't we count those drops as skb->dev->rx_dropped?
> Commonly NICs will do such filtering and if I got it right
> in struct rtnl_link_stats64 kdoc - report them as rx_dropped.
> It'd be inconsistent if on a physical interface we count
> these as rx_dropped and on SW interface (or with promisc enabled
> etc.) in the SNMP counters.

I like to see skb->dev->rx_dropped as a fallback-catch-all bucket
for all cases we do not already have a more specific counter.

> Or we can add a new link stat that NICs can use as well.

Yes, this could be done, but we have to be careful about not hitting
a single cache line, for the cases we receive floods of such messages
on multiqueue NIC.
(The single atomic in dev->rx_dropped) is suffering from this issue btw)

>
> In fact I'm not sure this is really a IP AKA L3 statistic,
> it's the L2 address that doesn't match.
>
>
> If everyone disagrees - should we at least rename the MIB counter
> similarly to the drop reason? Experience shows that users call for
> help when they see counters with Error in their name, I'd vote for
> IpExtInDropOtherhost or some such. The statistic should also be
> documented in Documentation/networking/snmp_counter.rst