On Fri, Jun 24, 2022 at 1:11 AM Ales Musil <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi Han,
>
> after our discussion I did he suggested test and the throughput does not
seem to be affected,
> I did the test with aging set to 2 sec, and during the test period (360
sec) the MAC binding was removed multiple times.
> There were some dropped packets, but the traffic was maintained with
minimal disturbance.

Thanks for sharing the result! I think different applications may react to
this kind of disturbance differently. Some may be sensitive to packet loss.
In addition, I believe this would also incur megaflow cache miss and
trigger OVS userspace processing in the middle of a flow.
May I know the traffic pattern of your test? Did you measure with iperf
during the test? Could share the numbers with v.s. without the drops?

On the other hand, if such random disturbance is not considered harmful for
some deployment, then I would also question the value of doing all those
OVS flow idle_age checkings on the *owner* chassis. There can be lots of
chassis consuming the same mac-binding entry but we are now checking "at
least one of them is not using the entry recently", which doesn't sound too
different from just blindly expiring the entries without checking anything,
and let it recreate if someone still needs it - if the minimal disturbance
is acceptable in such environment. ovn-northd can do this periodical check
easily and clean the expired entries, correct?

Thanks,
Han

>
>
> Thanks,
> Ales
>
> On Wed, Jun 22, 2022 at 9:51 AM Ales Musil <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 22, 2022 at 9:21 AM Han Zhou <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 2:08 AM Ales Musil <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> >
>>> > Add MAC binding aging mechanism, that
>>> > should take care of stale MAC bindings.
>>> >
>>> > The mechanism works on "ownership" of the
>>> > MAC binding row. The chassis that creates
>>> > the row is then checking if the "idle_age"
>>> > of the flow is over the aging threshold.
>>> > In that case the MAC binding is removed
>>> > from database. The "owner" might change
>>> > when another chassis saw an update of the
>>> > MAC address.
>>> >
>>> > This approach has downside, the chassis
>>> > that "owns" the MAC binding might not actually be
>>> > the one that is using it actively. This
>>> > might lead some delays in packet flow when
>>> > the row is removed.
>>> >
>>>
>>
>> Hi Han, thank you for your input.
>>
>>>
>>> Thanks Ales for working on this! The stale entries in MAC_Binding table
was a big TODO of OVN and a difficult problem. It is great to see a
solution finally, and I think utilizing the "idle_age" is brilliant. Before
reviewing it in more detail, I'd like to discuss the "downside" first.
>>>
>>> I think the "downside" here is indeed a problem with this approach. The
MAC binding in OVN is in fact the ARP cache (or neighbour table) of the
router, but OVN logical router is distributed (except for gateway-router
and DGP), so in most cases by nature of OVN LR the user of MAC binding
wouldn't be the one "owns" it. It would be a big dataplane performance
impact, thinking about a chassis that has a flow with high throughput of
packets suddenly needs to pause and wait for ovn-controller (and SB DB) to
complete the ARP resolution process. I saw this being pointed out and
discussed in the first version, but I'd raise more attention to it, because
the problem introduced would be much bigger than the stale entries in the
MAC binding table.
>>>
>>>
>>> I think the proposal from Daniel that transfers owner with "expire
timestamp" set would help, but I am also thinking that since the logical
router is distributed, it may be unreasonable to have an owner at all. My
suggestion is, instead of assigning "owner" for each entry, a central
controller can just be responsible for checking if any chassis still uses
the entry and removing it when no one uses it anymore. Naturally the
central controller can be hosted in ovn-northd. Here is the detailed
algorithm I am thinking:
>>>
>>> * when an entry is created (by any ovn-controller), an expire_timestamp
is set (e.g. 10 min from now - can be configurable)
>>> * Each ovn-controller: check the entries it uses and if the
expire_timestamp of the entry is past, but its own "idle_age" indicates the
entry is still needed, it will update the SB DB entry with a new
expire_timestamp. Note: before updating the SB DB, ovn-controller needs a
random delay, to avoid update storm to SB unnecessarily - in most cases
only one ovn-controller would update/refresh the SB DB when an entry is
expired.
>>> * ovn-northd periodically checks if there are entries with
expire_timestamp past longer than 1 min (this is related to the random
delay of ovn-controller, may be configurable, too), it will go ahead and
delete the entry.
>>>
>>> What do you think?
>>
>>
>> This is actually pretty close to the first approach that was suggested
in the BZ [0] for this. However your suggestion would cause less SB traffic
which is great. I would be still a bit worried that in case of big setups
there could be a lot of controllers trying to postpone the deletion of the
particular MAC binding. We are running some scale tests with the v2 patch
set, so we should have some answers whether the downside is causing any
visible troubles.
>>
>> I will definitely discuss this suggestion with the rest of the team.
>>
>>>
>>> In addition, such a change may still be risky in large scale
environments, and I think it worth experimenting first with a knob to
enable it (and disabled by default).
>>
>>
>> That would be in line with what Mark suggested, a special value that
disables mac binding e.g. threshold=0, which could be the default.
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Han
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Ales
>>
>> [0] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/2084668#c2
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> > The threshold can be configured in
>>> > NB_global table with key "mac_binding_age_threshold"
>>> > in seconds with default value being 60.
>>> >
>>> > The test case is present as separate patch of the series.
>>> >
>>> > Add delay to ARP response processing to prevent
>>> > race condition between multiple controllers
>>> > that received the same ARP.
>>> >
>>> > Ales Musil (6):
>>> >   Add chassis column to MAC_Binding table
>>> >   Add MAC binding aging mechanism
>>> >   Add stopwatch for MAC binding aging
>>> >   Allow the MAC binding age threshold to be configurable
>>> >   ovn.at: Add test case covering the MAC binding aging
>>> >   pinctrl.c: Add delay after ARP packet
>>> >
>>> >  controller/automake.mk         |   4 +-
>>> >  controller/mac-binding-aging.c | 241
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>> >  controller/mac-binding-aging.h |  32 +++++
>>> >  controller/ovn-controller.c    |  32 +++++
>>> >  controller/pinctrl.c           |  73 ++++++++--
>>> >  northd/northd.c                |  12 ++
>>> >  northd/ovn-northd.c            |   2 +-
>>> >  ovn-nb.xml                     |   5 +
>>> >  ovn-sb.ovsschema               |   6 +-
>>> >  ovn-sb.xml                     |   5 +
>>> >  tests/ovn.at                   | 212 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++--
>>> >  11 files changed, 595 insertions(+), 29 deletions(-)
>>> >  create mode 100644 controller/mac-binding-aging.c
>>> >  create mode 100644 controller/mac-binding-aging.h
>>> >
>>> > --
>>> > 2.35.3
>>> >
>>> > _______________________________________________
>>> > dev mailing list
>>> > [email protected]
>>> > https://mail.openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/ovs-dev
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Ales Musil
>>
>> Senior Software Engineer - OVN Core
>>
>> Red Hat EMEA
>>
>> [email protected]    IM: amusil
>
>
>
> --
>
> Ales Musil
>
> Senior Software Engineer - OVN Core
>
> Red Hat EMEA
>
> [email protected]    IM: amusil
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