[libvirt PATCH 2/2] nwfilter: Use immediate paket delivery mode rather than buffering

[Erik Skultety]

Our nwfilter code doesn't set any timeout on the pcap paket buffer which
means that when DHCP snooping is enabled on a guest interface and
libvirt is trying to learn the IP address from guest's DHCP traffic, it
takes up to 4x longer to ping a guest successfully compared to a case
where nwfilter isn't enabled at all or libvirt uses the cached nwfilter
leases to populate the corresponding rules to ebtables.
With the pcap filter and rate limiting already in place, we should be
able to afford enabling the immediate paket delivery, FWIW immediate
mode was actually the default prior libpcap-1.5.0 (CentOS 6) regardless
of whether a buffer was requested.

The lack of any kind of timeout on the pcap buffer messed with the
libvirt TCK test suite which, even with a generous timeout in place,
timeouts every single time simply because it takes a while until
guest actually starts producing any kind of traffic to fill up
the buffer in place (appart from the DHCP traffic which happens fairly
early on).

Signed-off-by: Erik Skultety <eskultet at redhat.com>
---

An alternative I've been also looking into is to use pcap_set_timeout before
activating the pcap handle. The question is what should an appropriate timeout
look like in that case (e.g. I tried with 500ms), but since prior
libpcap < 1.5.0 the capture devices were always in the immediate mode on Linux,
I'd go down the same road again, quoting the man page:

"in 1.5.0 and later, they are, by default, not in immediate mode, so if
pcap_set_immediate_mode() is available, it should be used"

 src/nwfilter/nwfilter_dhcpsnoop.c | 24 +-----------------------
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 23 deletions(-)

diff --git a/src/nwfilter/nwfilter_dhcpsnoop.c b/src/nwfilter/nwfilter_dhcpsnoop.c
index 10567e9cd3..a1c0c0189e 100644
--- a/src/nwfilter/nwfilter_dhcpsnoop.c
+++ b/src/nwfilter/nwfilter_dhcpsnoop.c
@@ -242,23 +242,6 @@ struct _virNWFilterDHCPDecodeJob {
 # define DHCP_PKT_BURST         50 /* pkts/sec */
 # define DHCP_BURST_INTERVAL_S  10 /* sec */

-/*
- * NB: Any libpcap built with HAVE_TPACKET3 will require
- * PCAP_BUFFERSIZE to be at least 262144 (although
- * pcap_set_buffer_size() with a lower value will succeed, and the
- * error will only show up later when pcap_setfilter() is called).
- *
- * It is possible that in the future libpcap could increase the
- * minimum size even further, but due to the fact that each guest
- * using dhcp snooping keeps 2 pcap sockets open (and thus 2 buffers
- * allocated) for the life of the guest, we want to minimize the
- * length of the buffer, so instead of leaving it at the default size
- * (2MB), we are setting it to the minimum viable size and including
- * this clue in the source to help quickly resolve the problem when/if
- * it reoccurs.
- */
-# define PCAP_BUFFERSIZE        (256 * 1024)
-
 # define MAX_QUEUED_JOBS        (DHCP_PKT_BURST + 2 * DHCP_PKT_RATE)

 typedef struct _virNWFilterSnoopRateLimitConf virNWFilterSnoopRateLimitConf;
@@ -1098,13 +1081,8 @@ virNWFilterSnoopDHCPOpen(const char *ifname, virMacAddr *mac,
         goto cleanup_nohandle;
     }

-    /* IMPORTANT: If there is any failure of *any* pcap_* function
-     * during setup of the socket, look to the comment where
-     * PCAP_BUFFERSIZE is defined. It may be too small, even if the
-     * generated error doesn't imply that.
-     */
     if (pcap_set_snaplen(handle, PCAP_PBUFSIZE) < 0 ||
-        pcap_set_buffer_size(handle, PCAP_BUFFERSIZE) < 0 ||
+        pcap_set_immediate_mode(handle, 1) < 0 ||
         pcap_activate(handle) < 0) {
         virReportError(VIR_ERR_INTERNAL_ERROR,
                        _("setup of pcap handle failed: %s"),
--
2.24.1