Until now, we were marking routes as REF_STALE and REF_DISCARD to
cleanup old routes after route refresh. This needed a synchronous route
table walk at both beginning and the end of route refresh routine,
marking the routes by the flags.
We avoid these walks by using a stale counter. Every route contains:
u8 stale_cycle;
Every import hook contains:
u8 stale_set;
u8 stale_valid;
u8 stale_pruned;
u8 stale_pruning;
In base_state, stale_set == stale_valid == stale_pruned == stale_pruning
and all routes' stale_cycle also have the same value.
The route refresh looks like follows:
+ ----------- + --------- + ----------- + ------------- + ------------ +
| | stale_set | stale_valid | stale_pruning | stale_pruned |
| Base | x | x | x | x |
| Begin | x+1 | x | x | x |
... now routes are being inserted with stale_cycle == (x+1)
| End | x+1 | x+1 | x | x |
... now table pruning routine is scheduled
| Prune begin | x+1 | x+1 | x+1 | x |
... now routes with stale_cycle not between stale_set and stale_valid
are deleted
| Prune end | x+1 | x+1 | x+1 | x+1 |
+ ----------- + --------- + ----------- + ------------- + ------------ +
The pruning routine is asynchronous and may have high latency in
high-load environments. Therefore, multiple route refresh requests may
happen before the pruning routine starts, leading to this situation:
| Prune begin | x+k | x+k | x -> x+k | x |
... or even
| Prune begin | x+k+1 | x+k | x -> x+k | x |
... if the prune event starts while another route refresh is running.
In such a case, the pruning routine still deletes routes not fitting
between stale_set and and stale_valid, effectively pruning the remnants
of all unpruned route refreshes from before:
| Prune end | x+k | x+k | x+k | x+k |
In extremely rare cases, there may happen too many route refreshes
before any route prune routine finishes. If the difference between
stale_valid and stale_pruned becomes more than 128 when requesting for
another route refresh, the routine walks the table synchronously and
resets all the stale values to a base state, while logging a warning.
In the multithreaded environment, it is not supposed that anybody
traverses the routing table as the CLI show-route was doing. Now the
routing table traversal is gone and CLI won't hold the table locked
while computing filters.
There were quite a lot of conflicts in flowspec validation code which
ultimately led to some code being a bit rewritten, not only adapted from
this or that branch, yet it is still in a limit of a merge.
For now, all route attributes are stored as eattrs in ea_list. This
should make route manipulation easier and it also allows for a layered
approach of route attributes where updates from filters will be stored
as an overlay over the previous version.
As there is either a nexthop or another destination specification
(or othing in case of ROAs and Flowspec), it may be merged together.
This code is somehow quirky and should be replaced in future by better
implementation of nexthop.
Also flowspec validation result has its own attribute now as it doesn't
have anything to do with route nexthop.
This doesn't do anything more than to put the whole structure inside
adata. The overall performance is certainly going downhill; we'll
optimize this later.
Anyway, this is one of the latest items inside rta and in several
commits we may drop rta completely and move to eattrs-only routes.
The prune loop may may rebuild the prefix trie and therefore invalidate
walk state for asynchronous walks (used in 'show route in' cmd). Fix it
by adding locking that keeps the old trie in memory until current walks
are done.
In future this could be improved by rebuilding trie walk states (by
lookup for last found prefix) after the prefix trie rebuild.
When output of 'show route' command was generated, the net_format() was
called for each network prematurely, even if the result was not needed.
Fix the code to call net_format() only when needed. This makes queries
that process many networks but show only few (e.g. 'show route where ..',
or 'show route count') much faster (like 5x - 10x faster).
Channels have now included rt_import_req and rt_export_req to hook into
the table instead of just one list node. This will (in future) allow for:
* channel import and export bound to different tables
* more efficient pipe code (dropping most of the channel code)
* conversion of 'show route' to a special kind of export
* temporary static routes from CLI
The import / export states are also updated to the new algorithms.
Routes are now allocated only when they are just to be inserted to the
table. Updating a route needs a locally allocated route structure.
Ownership of the attributes is also now not transfered from protocols to
tables and vice versa but just borrowed which should be easier to handle
in a multithreaded environment.
Use a hierarchical bitmap in a routing table to assign ids to routes, and
then use bitmaps (indexed by route id) in channels to keep track whether
routes were exported. This avoids unreliable and inefficient re-evaluation
of filters for old routes in order to determine whether they were exported.
The temporary atttributes are no longer removed by ea_do_prune(), but
they are undefined by store_tmp_attrs() protocol hooks. This fixes
several bugs where temporary attributes were removed when they should
not or not removed when they should be. The flag EAF_TEMP is no longer
needed and was removed.
Update all protocol make_tmp_attrs() / store_tmp_attrs() hooks to use
helper functions and to handle unset attributes properly.
Also fix some related bugs like improper handling of empty eattr list.
Once upon a time, far far away, there were the old Bird developers
discussing what direction of route flow shall be called import and
export. They decided to say "import to protocol" and "export to table"
when speaking about a protocol. When speaking about a table, they
spoke about "importing to table" and "exporting to protocol".
The latter terminology was adopted in configuration, then also the
bird CLI in commit ea2ae6dd0 started to use it (in year 2009). Now
it's 2018 and the terminology is the latter. Import is from protocol to
table, export is from table to protocol. Anyway, there was still an
import_control hook which executed right before route export.
One thing is funny. There are two commits in April 1999 with just two
minutes between them. The older announces the final settlement
on config terminology, the newer uses the other definition. Let's see
their commit messages as the git-log tool shows them (the newer first):
commit 9e0e485e50
Author: Martin Mares <mj@ucw.cz>
Date: Mon Apr 5 20:17:59 1999 +0000
Added some new protocol hooks (look at the comments for better explanation):
make_tmp_attrs Convert inline attributes to ea_list
store_tmp_attrs Convert ea_list to inline attributes
import_control Pre-import decisions
commit 5056c559c4
Author: Martin Mares <mj@ucw.cz>
Date: Mon Apr 5 20:15:31 1999 +0000
Changed syntax of attaching filters to protocols to hopefully the final
version:
EXPORT <filter-spec> for outbound routes (i.e., those announced
by BIRD to the rest of the world).
IMPORT <filter-spec> for inbound routes (i.e., those imported
by BIRD from the rest of the world).
where <filter-spec> is one of:
ALL pass all routes
NONE drop all routes
FILTER <name> use named filter
FILTER { <filter> } use explicitly defined filter
For all protocols, the default is IMPORT ALL, EXPORT NONE. This includes
the kernel protocol, so that you need to add EXPORT ALL to get the previous
configuration of kernel syncer (as usually, see doc/bird.conf.example for
a bird.conf example :)).
Let's say RIP to this almost 19-years-old inconsistency. For now, if you
import a route, it is always from protocol to table. If you export a
route, it is always from table to protocol.
And they lived happily ever after.
This is a fundamental change of an original (1999) concept of route
processing inside BIRD. During import/export, there was a temporary
ea_list created which was to be used instead of the another one inside
the route itself.
This led to some confusion, quirks, and strange filter code that handled
extended route attributes. Dropping it now.
The protocol interface has changed in an uniform way -- the
`struct ea_list *attrs` argument has been removed from store_tmp_attrs(),
import_control(), rt_notify() and get_route_info().
