Re: [PATCH] bpf: call get_random_u32() for random integers

[Jason A. Donenfeld]

Hi Toke,

On Tue, Dec 6, 2022 at 1:50 PM Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> "Jason A. Donenfeld" <Jason@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > On Mon, Dec 05, 2022 at 11:21:51PM +0100, Daniel Borkmann wrote:
> >> On 12/5/22 7:15 PM, Jason A. Donenfeld wrote:
> >> > Since BPF's bpf_user_rnd_u32() was introduced, there have been three
> >> > significant developments in the RNG: 1) get_random_u32() returns the
> >> > same types of bytes as /dev/urandom, eliminating the distinction between
> >> > "kernel random bytes" and "userspace random bytes", 2) get_random_u32()
> >> > operates mostly locklessly over percpu state, 3) get_random_u32() has
> >> > become quite fast.
> >>
> >> Wrt "quite fast", do you have a comparison between the two? Asking as its
> >> often used in networking worst case on per packet basis (e.g. via XDP), would
> >> be useful to state concrete numbers for the two on a given machine.
> >
> > Median of 25 cycles vs median of 38, on my Tiger Lake machine. So a
> > little slower, but too small of a difference to matter.
>
> Assuming a 3Ghz CPU clock (so 3 cycles per nanosecond), that's an
> additional overhead of ~4.3 ns. When processing 10 Gbps at line rate
> with small packets, the per-packet processing budget is 67.2 ns, so
> those extra 4.3 ns will eat up ~6.4% of the budget.
>
> So in other words, "too small a difference to matter" is definitely not
> true in general. It really depends on the use case; if someone is using
> this to, say, draw per-packet random numbers to compute a drop frequency
> on ingress, that extra processing time will most likely result in a
> quite measurable drop in performance.

Huh, neat calculation, I'll keep that method in mind.

Alright, sorry for the noise here. I'll check back in if I ever manage
to eliminate that performance gap.

Jason