[PATCH RFC v1 net-next 00/12] bridge-fastpath and related improvements

[Felix Fietkau]

On 17.10.24 14:39, Pablo Neira Ayuso wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 11:17:09AM +0200, Felix Fietkau wrote:
> [...]
>> By the way, based on some reports that I received, I do believe that the
>> existing forwarding fastpath also doesn't handle roaming properly.
>> I just didn't have the time to properly look into that yet.
> 
> I think it should work for the existing forwarding fastpath.
> 
> - If computer roams from different port, packets follow classic path,
>    then new flow entry is created. The flow old entry expires after 30
>    seconds.
> - If route is stale, flow entry is also removed.
> 
> Maybe I am missing another possible scenario?

I'm mainly talking about the scenario where a computer moves to a 
different switch port on L2 only, so all routes remain the same.

I haven't fully analyzed the issue, but I did find a few potential 
issues with what you're describing.

1. Since one direction remains the same when a computer roams, a new 
flow entry would probably fail to be added because of an existing entry 
in the flow hash table.

2. Even with that out of the way, the MTK hardware offload currently 
does not support matching the incoming switch/ethernet port.
So even if we manage to add an updated entry, the old entry could still 
be kept alive by the hardware.

The issues I found probably wouldn't cause connection hangs in pure L3 
software flow offload, since it will use the bridge device for xmit 
instead of its members. But since hardware offload needs to redirect 
traffic to individual bridge ports, it could cause connection hangs with 
stale flow entries.

There might be other issues as well, but this is what I could come up 
with on short notice. I think in order to properly address this, we 
should probably monitor for FDB / neigh entry changes somehow and clear 
affected flows.
Routes do not become stale in my scenario, so something else is needed 
to trigger flow entry removal.

- Felix