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diff --git a/Documentation/networking/rds.txt b/Documentation/networking/rds.txt new file mode 100644 index 00000000..c67077cb --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/networking/rds.txt @@ -0,0 +1,356 @@ + +Overview +======== + +This readme tries to provide some background on the hows and whys of RDS, +and will hopefully help you find your way around the code. + +In addition, please see this email about RDS origins: +http://oss.oracle.com/pipermail/rds-devel/2007-November/000228.html + +RDS Architecture +================ + +RDS provides reliable, ordered datagram delivery by using a single +reliable connection between any two nodes in the cluster. This allows +applications to use a single socket to talk to any other process in the +cluster - so in a cluster with N processes you need N sockets, in contrast +to N*N if you use a connection-oriented socket transport like TCP. + +RDS is not Infiniband-specific; it was designed to support different +transports. The current implementation used to support RDS over TCP as well +as IB. Work is in progress to support RDS over iWARP, and using DCE to +guarantee no dropped packets on Ethernet, it may be possible to use RDS over +UDP in the future. + +The high-level semantics of RDS from the application's point of view are + + * Addressing + RDS uses IPv4 addresses and 16bit port numbers to identify + the end point of a connection. All socket operations that involve + passing addresses between kernel and user space generally + use a struct sockaddr_in. + + The fact that IPv4 addresses are used does not mean the underlying + transport has to be IP-based. In fact, RDS over IB uses a + reliable IB connection; the IP address is used exclusively to + locate the remote node's GID (by ARPing for the given IP). + + The port space is entirely independent of UDP, TCP or any other + protocol. + + * Socket interface + RDS sockets work *mostly* as you would expect from a BSD + socket. The next section will cover the details. At any rate, + all I/O is performed through the standard BSD socket API. + Some additions like zerocopy support are implemented through + control messages, while other extensions use the getsockopt/ + setsockopt calls. + + Sockets must be bound before you can send or receive data. + This is needed because binding also selects a transport and + attaches it to the socket. Once bound, the transport assignment + does not change. RDS will tolerate IPs moving around (eg in + a active-active HA scenario), but only as long as the address + doesn't move to a different transport. + + * sysctls + RDS supports a number of sysctls in /proc/sys/net/rds + + +Socket Interface +================ + + AF_RDS, PF_RDS, SOL_RDS + These constants haven't been assigned yet, because RDS isn't in + mainline yet. Currently, the kernel module assigns some constant + and publishes it to user space through two sysctl files + /proc/sys/net/rds/pf_rds + /proc/sys/net/rds/sol_rds + + fd = socket(PF_RDS, SOCK_SEQPACKET, 0); + This creates a new, unbound RDS socket. + + setsockopt(SOL_SOCKET): send and receive buffer size + RDS honors the send and receive buffer size socket options. + You are not allowed to queue more than SO_SNDSIZE bytes to + a socket. A message is queued when sendmsg is called, and + it leaves the queue when the remote system acknowledges + its arrival. + + The SO_RCVSIZE option controls the maximum receive queue length. + This is a soft limit rather than a hard limit - RDS will + continue to accept and queue incoming messages, even if that + takes the queue length over the limit. However, it will also + mark the port as "congested" and send a congestion update to + the source node. The source node is supposed to throttle any + processes sending to this congested port. + + bind(fd, &sockaddr_in, ...) + This binds the socket to a local IP address and port, and a + transport. + + sendmsg(fd, ...) + Sends a message to the indicated recipient. The kernel will + transparently establish the underlying reliable connection + if it isn't up yet. + + An attempt to send a message that exceeds SO_SNDSIZE will + return with -EMSGSIZE + + An attempt to send a message that would take the total number + of queued bytes over the SO_SNDSIZE threshold will return + EAGAIN. + + An attempt to send a message to a destination that is marked + as "congested" will return ENOBUFS. + + recvmsg(fd, ...) + Receives a message that was queued to this socket. The sockets + recv queue accounting is adjusted, and if the queue length + drops below SO_SNDSIZE, the port is marked uncongested, and + a congestion update is sent to all peers. + + Applications can ask the RDS kernel module to receive + notifications via control messages (for instance, there is a + notification when a congestion update arrived, or when a RDMA + operation completes). These notifications are received through + the msg.msg_control buffer of struct msghdr. The format of the + messages is described in manpages. + + poll(fd) + RDS supports the poll interface to allow the application + to implement async I/O. + + POLLIN handling is pretty straightforward. When there's an + incoming message queued to the socket, or a pending notification, + we signal POLLIN. + + POLLOUT is a little harder. Since you can essentially send + to any destination, RDS will always signal POLLOUT as long as + there's room on the send queue (ie the number of bytes queued + is less than the sendbuf size). + + However, the kernel will refuse to accept messages to + a destination marked congested - in this case you will loop + forever if you rely on poll to tell you what to do. + This isn't a trivial problem, but applications can deal with + this - by using congestion notifications, and by checking for + ENOBUFS errors returned by sendmsg. + + setsockopt(SOL_RDS, RDS_CANCEL_SENT_TO, &sockaddr_in) + This allows the application to discard all messages queued to a + specific destination on this particular socket. + + This allows the application to cancel outstanding messages if + it detects a timeout. For instance, if it tried to send a message, + and the remote host is unreachable, RDS will keep trying forever. + The application may decide it's not worth it, and cancel the + operation. In this case, it would use RDS_CANCEL_SENT_TO to + nuke any pending messages. + + +RDMA for RDS +============ + + see rds-rdma(7) manpage (available in rds-tools) + + +Congestion Notifications +======================== + + see rds(7) manpage + + +RDS Protocol +============ + + Message header + + The message header is a 'struct rds_header' (see rds.h): + Fields: + h_sequence: + per-packet sequence number + h_ack: + piggybacked acknowledgment of last packet received + h_len: + length of data, not including header + h_sport: + source port + h_dport: + destination port + h_flags: + CONG_BITMAP - this is a congestion update bitmap + ACK_REQUIRED - receiver must ack this packet + RETRANSMITTED - packet has previously been sent + h_credit: + indicate to other end of connection that + it has more credits available (i.e. there is + more send room) + h_padding[4]: + unused, for future use + h_csum: + header checksum + h_exthdr: + optional data can be passed here. This is currently used for + passing RDMA-related information. + + ACK and retransmit handling + + One might think that with reliable IB connections you wouldn't need + to ack messages that have been received. The problem is that IB + hardware generates an ack message before it has DMAed the message + into memory. This creates a potential message loss if the HCA is + disabled for any reason between when it sends the ack and before + the message is DMAed and processed. This is only a potential issue + if another HCA is available for fail-over. + + Sending an ack immediately would allow the sender to free the sent + message from their send queue quickly, but could cause excessive + traffic to be used for acks. RDS piggybacks acks on sent data + packets. Ack-only packets are reduced by only allowing one to be + in flight at a time, and by the sender only asking for acks when + its send buffers start to fill up. All retransmissions are also + acked. + + Flow Control + + RDS's IB transport uses a credit-based mechanism to verify that + there is space in the peer's receive buffers for more data. This + eliminates the need for hardware retries on the connection. + + Congestion + + Messages waiting in the receive queue on the receiving socket + are accounted against the sockets SO_RCVBUF option value. Only + the payload bytes in the message are accounted for. If the + number of bytes queued equals or exceeds rcvbuf then the socket + is congested. All sends attempted to this socket's address + should return block or return -EWOULDBLOCK. + + Applications are expected to be reasonably tuned such that this + situation very rarely occurs. An application encountering this + "back-pressure" is considered a bug. + + This is implemented by having each node maintain bitmaps which + indicate which ports on bound addresses are congested. As the + bitmap changes it is sent through all the connections which + terminate in the local address of the bitmap which changed. + + The bitmaps are allocated as connections are brought up. This + avoids allocation in the interrupt handling path which queues + sages on sockets. The dense bitmaps let transports send the + entire bitmap on any bitmap change reasonably efficiently. This + is much easier to implement than some finer-grained + communication of per-port congestion. The sender does a very + inexpensive bit test to test if the port it's about to send to + is congested or not. + + +RDS Transport Layer +================== + + As mentioned above, RDS is not IB-specific. Its code is divided + into a general RDS layer and a transport layer. + + The general layer handles the socket API, congestion handling, + loopback, stats, usermem pinning, and the connection state machine. + + The transport layer handles the details of the transport. The IB + transport, for example, handles all the queue pairs, work requests, + CM event handlers, and other Infiniband details. + + +RDS Kernel Structures +===================== + + struct rds_message + aka possibly "rds_outgoing", the generic RDS layer copies data to + be sent and sets header fields as needed, based on the socket API. + This is then queued for the individual connection and sent by the + connection's transport. + struct rds_incoming + a generic struct referring to incoming data that can be handed from + the transport to the general code and queued by the general code + while the socket is awoken. It is then passed back to the transport + code to handle the actual copy-to-user. + struct rds_socket + per-socket information + struct rds_connection + per-connection information + struct rds_transport + pointers to transport-specific functions + struct rds_statistics + non-transport-specific statistics + struct rds_cong_map + wraps the raw congestion bitmap, contains rbnode, waitq, etc. + +Connection management +===================== + + Connections may be in UP, DOWN, CONNECTING, DISCONNECTING, and + ERROR states. + + The first time an attempt is made by an RDS socket to send data to + a node, a connection is allocated and connected. That connection is + then maintained forever -- if there are transport errors, the + connection will be dropped and re-established. + + Dropping a connection while packets are queued will cause queued or + partially-sent datagrams to be retransmitted when the connection is + re-established. + + +The send path +============= + + rds_sendmsg() + struct rds_message built from incoming data + CMSGs parsed (e.g. RDMA ops) + transport connection alloced and connected if not already + rds_message placed on send queue + send worker awoken + rds_send_worker() + calls rds_send_xmit() until queue is empty + rds_send_xmit() + transmits congestion map if one is pending + may set ACK_REQUIRED + calls transport to send either non-RDMA or RDMA message + (RDMA ops never retransmitted) + rds_ib_xmit() + allocs work requests from send ring + adds any new send credits available to peer (h_credits) + maps the rds_message's sg list + piggybacks ack + populates work requests + post send to connection's queue pair + +The recv path +============= + + rds_ib_recv_cq_comp_handler() + looks at write completions + unmaps recv buffer from device + no errors, call rds_ib_process_recv() + refill recv ring + rds_ib_process_recv() + validate header checksum + copy header to rds_ib_incoming struct if start of a new datagram + add to ibinc's fraglist + if competed datagram: + update cong map if datagram was cong update + call rds_recv_incoming() otherwise + note if ack is required + rds_recv_incoming() + drop duplicate packets + respond to pings + find the sock associated with this datagram + add to sock queue + wake up sock + do some congestion calculations + rds_recvmsg + copy data into user iovec + handle CMSGs + return to application + + |