Re: [PATCH bpf-next v2 0/8] Support defragmenting IPv(4|6) packets in BPF

[Alexei Starovoitov]

On Tue, Mar 7, 2023 at 12:11 PM Florian Westphal <fw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Daniel Xu <dxu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > From my reading (I'll run some tests later) it looks like netfilter
> > will defrag all ipv4/ipv6 packets in any netns with conntrack enabled.
> > It appears to do so in NF_INET_PRE_ROUTING.
>
> Yes, and output.
>
> > One thing we would need though are (probably kfunc) wrappers around
> > nf_defrag_ipv4_enable() and nf_defrag_ipv6_enable() to ensure BPF progs
> > are not transitively depending on defrag support from other netfilter
> > modules.
> >
> > The exact mechanism would probably need some thinking, as the above
> > functions kinda rely on module_init() and module_exit() semantics. We
> > cannot make the prog bump the refcnt every time it runs -- it would
> > overflow.  And it would be nice to automatically free the refcnt when
> > prog is unloaded.
>
> Probably add a flag attribute that is evaluated at BPF_LINK time, so
> progs can say they need defrag enabled.  Same could be used to request
> conntrack enablement.
>
> Will need some glue on netfilter side to handle DEFRAG=m, but we already
> have plenty of those.

All makes perfect sense to me.
It's cleaner than a special netdevice.
ipv4_conntrack_defrag() is pretty neat. I didn't know about it.
If we can reuse it as-is that would be ideal.
Conceptually it fits perfectly.
If we cannot reuse it (for whatever unlikely reason) I would
argue that TC hook should gain similar functionality.