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.