Re: [RFC net-next 1/9] skb: introduce gro_disabled bit

[Paolo Abeni]

On Thu, 2024-06-20 at 15:19 -0700, Yan Zhai wrote:
> Software GRO is currently controlled by a single switch, i.e.
> 
>   ethtool -K dev gro on|off
> 
> However, this is not always desired. When GRO is enabled, even if the
> kernel cannot GRO certain traffic, it has to run through the GRO receive
> handlers with no benefit.
> 
> There are also scenarios that turning off GRO is a requirement. For
> example, our production environment has a scenario that a TC egress hook
> may add multiple encapsulation headers to forwarded skbs for load
> balancing and isolation purpose. The encapsulation is implemented via
> BPF. But the problem arises then: there is no way to properly offload a
> double-encapsulated packet, since skb only has network_header and
> inner_network_header to track one layer of encapsulation, but not two.
> On the other hand, not all the traffic through this device needs double
> encapsulation. But we have to turn off GRO completely for any ingress
> device as a result.
> 
> Introduce a bit on skb so that GRO engine can be notified to skip GRO on
> this skb, rather than having to be 0-or-1 for all traffic.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Yan Zhai <yan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> ---
>  include/linux/netdevice.h |  9 +++++++--
>  include/linux/skbuff.h    | 10 ++++++++++
>  net/Kconfig               | 10 ++++++++++
>  net/core/gro.c            |  2 +-
>  net/core/gro_cells.c      |  2 +-
>  net/core/skbuff.c         |  4 ++++
>  6 files changed, 33 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/include/linux/netdevice.h b/include/linux/netdevice.h
> index c83b390191d4..2ca0870b1221 100644
> --- a/include/linux/netdevice.h
> +++ b/include/linux/netdevice.h
> @@ -2415,11 +2415,16 @@ struct net_device {
>  	((dev)->devlink_port = (port));				\
>  })
>  
> -static inline bool netif_elide_gro(const struct net_device *dev)
> +static inline bool netif_elide_gro(const struct sk_buff *skb)
>  {
> -	if (!(dev->features & NETIF_F_GRO) || dev->xdp_prog)
> +	if (!(skb->dev->features & NETIF_F_GRO) || skb->dev->xdp_prog)
>  		return true;
> +
> +#ifdef CONFIG_SKB_GRO_CONTROL
> +	return skb->gro_disabled;
> +#else
>  	return false;
> +#endif

This will generate OoO if the gro_disabled is flipped in the middle of
a stream.

Assuming the above is fine for your use case (I think it's _not_ in
general), you could get the same result without an additional costly
bit in sk_buff.

Let xdp_frame_fixup_skb_offloading() return a bool - e.g. 'true' when
gro should be avoided - and let the NIC driver call netif_receive_skb()
instead of the gro rx hook for such packet.

All in all the approach implemented in this series does not look worthy
to me.

Thanks,

Paolo