CFR: routing table locking
Sam Leffler
sam at errno.com
Wed Aug 20 09:14:15 PDT 2003
http://www.freebsd.org/~sam/rtentry.patch
This is an extensive set of changes to lock routing table entries. There
are some issues with these changes that will need to be resolved before
committing the work. In particular the per-entry mutex is stored in the
rtentry structure and this struct is visible to user applications like
route(8). This must be fixed. For now I've #ifdef'd the mutex to be
included only in the kernel. We'll either need to use an indirect
reference to a mutex or, more likely, introduce an externalized version of
struct rtentry to decouple kernel operation from user applications. It may
be possible to jigger the code to make the lock in the entry be a leaf lock
in which case we could use a mutex pool and a pointer to a mutex but I'm
leaning more to decoupling the kernel from user apps as this has general
benefits.
These changes have been in use on 4 of my machines for several weeks. IPv6
has only been lightly tested. In general I consider the code very lightly
tested so don't be surprised if you encounter issues. Also, because of the
wide visibility of the routing table in the system I may have missed some
uses that need locking. There are a couple of LOR issues to be resolved.
In particular I recall there is one with the ARP cache.
Another issue is that these changes do not include multicast routing. That
code has been changing recently so I left it alone. I'm not well setup to
test multicast routing so if someone with an existing setup is interested
in tacking this please let me know.
Note there is one API change buried in these diffs. I dropped the last
parameter to rtredirect that allowed callers to receive a reference to the
associated entry. This was not used in the system and introduced issues
for locking.
Sam
More information about the freebsd-net
mailing list