On Tue, Sep 5, 2017 at 2:13 PM, Tom Herbert <t...@herbertland.com> wrote: >> The situation with encapsulation is even more complicated: >> >> We are basically only interested in the UDP/vxlan/Ethernet/IP/UDP >> constellation. If we do the fragmentation inside the vxlan tunnel and >> carry over the skb hash to all resulting UDP/vxlan packets source ports, >> we are fine and reordering on the receiver NIC won't happen in this >> case. If the fragmentation happens on the outer UDP header, this will >> result in reordering of the inner L2 flow. Unfortunately this depends on >> how the vxlan tunnel was set up, how other devices do that and (I >> believe so) on the kernel version. >> > This really isn't that complicated. The assumption that an IP network > always delivers packets in order is simply wrong. The inventors of > VXLAN must have know full well that when you use IP, packets can and > eventually will be delivered out of order. This isn't just because of > fragmentation, there are many other reasons that packets can be > delivered OOO. This also must have been known when IP/GRE and any > other protocol that carries L2 over IP was invented. If OOO is an > issue for these protocols then they need to be fixed-- this is not a > concern with IP protocol nor the stack. > > Tom
As far as a little background on the original patch I believe the issue that was fixed by the patch was a video streaming application that was sending/receiving a mix of fragmented and non-fragmented packets. Receiving them out of order due to the fragmentation was causing issues with stutters in the video and so we ended up disabling UDP by default in the NICs listed. We decided to go that way as UDP RSS was viewed as a performance optimization, while the out-of-order problems were viewed as a functionality issue. The default for i40e is to have UDP RSS hashing enabled if I recall correctly. Basically as we move away from enterprise to cloud I suspect that is going to be the case more and more since all the UDP tunnels require either port recognition or UDP RSS to be enabled. For now we carry the ability to enable UDP RSS if desired in the legacy drivers, and I believe we have some white papers somewhere that suggest enabling it if you are planning to use UDP based tunnels. - Alex
