Linux Ethernet Bridging - Jun 2016 - [Bridge] [PATCH net-next v2] bridge: Synchronize unicast filtering with FDB

From: Toshiaki Makita <makita.toshiaki at lab.ntt.co.jp>
Date: Mon,  6 Jun 2016 21:20:13 +0900
> Patrick Schaaf reported that flooding due to a missing fdb entry of
> the address of macvlan on the bridge device caused high CPU
> consumption of an openvpn process behind a tap bridge port.
> Adding an fdb entry of the macvlan address can suppress flooding
> and avoid this problem.
> 
> This change makes bridge able to synchronize unicast filtering with
> fdb automatically so admin do not need to manually add an fdb entry.
> This effectively supports IFF_UNICAST_FLT in bridge, thus adding an
> macvlan device would not place bridge into promiscuous mode as well.
> 
> v2:
> - Test vlan with br_vlan_should_use() in br_fdb_sync_uc() as per
>   Nikolay Aleksandrov.
> 
> Reported-by: Patrick Schaaf <netdev at bof.de>
> Signed-off-by: Toshiaki Makita <makita.toshiaki at lab.ntt.co.jp>
I really need bridging experts to review and ACK/NACK this.

Thanks.

On 06/11/2016 07:35 AM, David Miller wrote:
> From: Toshiaki Makita <makita.toshiaki at lab.ntt.co.jp>
> Date: Mon,  6 Jun 2016 21:20:13 +0900
> 
>> Patrick Schaaf reported that flooding due to a missing fdb entry of
>> the address of macvlan on the bridge device caused high CPU
>> consumption of an openvpn process behind a tap bridge port.
>> Adding an fdb entry of the macvlan address can suppress flooding
>> and avoid this problem.
>>
>> This change makes bridge able to synchronize unicast filtering with
>> fdb automatically so admin do not need to manually add an fdb entry.
>> This effectively supports IFF_UNICAST_FLT in bridge, thus adding an
>> macvlan device would not place bridge into promiscuous mode as well.
>>
>> v2:
>> - Test vlan with br_vlan_should_use() in br_fdb_sync_uc() as per
>>   Nikolay Aleksandrov.
>>
>> Reported-by: Patrick Schaaf <netdev at bof.de>
>> Signed-off-by: Toshiaki Makita <makita.toshiaki at lab.ntt.co.jp>
> 
> I really need bridging experts to review and ACK/NACK this.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
Oops, I almost missed the v2, sorry about that. So, technically it looks
correct, but
I only fear the scalability impact of the change. If there're a large number
of vlans
adding a macvlan (or any device that syncs uc addr) might become very slow and
every
flag change will become very slow too without an option to revert to the
original
behaviour so we'll have to wait for the entries to be added in order to
delete them.
Another common scenario is having 8021q interfaces on top of the bridge with
different
mac addresses for some of the configured vlans (or with macvlans on top of them
for VRR),
that use case would suffer as well because their macs need to be local only for
those vlans,
and not the 2000+ other vlans that might exist.
On every sync_uc() call all the fdb entries get deleted and added again, so even
after deleting
some manually they can come back unexpectedly after some operation and also the
message storm from
all the deletes and adds could be problematic as well.

E.g. 2000 br0 vlans, 25 macvlans on br0 (adding them took more than 5 minutes,
53k fdb entries):
$ bridge fdb del de:8e:9f:16:c5:71 dev br0 vlan 289
$ ip l set br0 multicast on
$ bridge fdb | grep 289 | grep de:8e:9f:16:c5:71
de:8e:9f:16:c5:71 dev br0 vlan 1289 master br0 permanent
de:8e:9f:16:c5:71 dev br0 vlan 289 master br0 permanent

In fact you can't escape the slow performance even if you delete all entries
because on the
next flag change or interface add, they will be added back.

Cheers,
 Nik