For BGP LLGR purposes, there was an API allowing a protocol to directly
modify their stale routes in table before flushing them. This API was
called by the table prune routine which violates the future locking
requirements.
Instead of this, BGP now requests a special route export and reimports
these routes into the table, allowing for asynchronous execution without
locking the table on export.
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.
Until now, if export table was enabled, Nest was storing exactly the
route before rt_notify() was called on it. This was quite sloppy and
spooky and it also wasn't reflecting the changes BGP does before
sending. And as BGP is storing the routes to be sent anyway, we are
simply keeping the already-sent routes in there to better rule out
unneeded reexports.
Some of the route attributes (IGP metric, preference) make no sense in
BGP, therefore these will be probably replaced by something sensible.
Also the nexthop shown in the short output is the BGP nexthop.
Passing protocol to preexport was in fact a historical relic from the
old times when channels weren't a thing. Refactoring that to match
current extensibility needs.
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.
Validation is called internally from route table at the same place where
nexthop resolution is done. Also accounting for rte->sender semantics
change (not a channel but the import hook instead).
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 prefix hash table in BGP used the same hash function as the rtable.
When a batch of routes are exported during feed/flush to the BGP, they
all have similar hash values, so they are all crowded in a few slots in
the BGP prefix table (which is much smaller - around the size of the
batch - and uses higher bits from hash values), making it much slower due
to excessive collisions. Use a different hash function to avoid this.
Also, increase the batch size to fill 4k BGP packets and increase minimum
BGP bucket and prefix hash sizes to avoid back and forth resizing during
flushes.
This leads to order of magnitude faster flushes (on my test data).
The route scope attribute was used for simple user route marking. As
there is a better tool for this (custom attributes), the old and limited
way can be dropped.
Some tokens are both keywords and symbols. For now, we allow only
specific keywords to be redefined; in future, more of the keywords may
be added to this category.
The redefinable keywords must be specified in any .Y file as follows:
toksym: THE_KEYWORD ;
See proto/bgp/config.Y for an example.
Also dropped a lot of unused terminals.
Changes in internal API:
* Every route attribute must be defined as struct ea_class somewhere.
* Registration of route attributes known at startup must be done by
ea_register_init() from protocol build functions.
* Every attribute has now its symbol registered in a global symbol table
defined as SYM_ATTRIBUTE
* All attribute ID's are dynamically allocated.
* Attribute value custom formatting hook is defined in the ea_class.
* Attribute names are the same for display and filters, always prefixed
by protocol name.
Also added some unit testing code for filters with route attributes.
