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authorPablo Neira Ayuso <pablo@netfilter.org>2009-03-24 16:37:55 -0700
committerDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>2009-03-24 16:37:55 -0700
commit38938bfe3489394e2eed5e40c9bb8f66a2ce1405 (patch)
treecbe1cafdaa990d31f0297d306e3adc61bb1e95a2 /include/linux/netlink.h
parent7f649269c318c41030e492fc35f03d38c6e3b39b (diff)
netlink: add NETLINK_NO_ENOBUFS socket flag
This patch adds the NETLINK_NO_ENOBUFS socket flag. This flag can be used by unicast and broadcast listeners to avoid receiving ENOBUFS errors. Generally speaking, ENOBUFS errors are useful to notify two things to the listener: a) You may increase the receiver buffer size via setsockopt(). b) You have lost messages, you may be out of sync. In some cases, ignoring ENOBUFS errors can be useful. For example: a) nfnetlink_queue: this subsystem does not have any sort of resync method and you can decide to ignore ENOBUFS once you have set a given buffer size. b) ctnetlink: you can use this together with the socket flag NETLINK_BROADCAST_SEND_ERROR to stop getting ENOBUFS errors as you do not need to resync (packets whose event are not delivered are drop to provide reliable logging and state-synchronization). Moreover, the use of NETLINK_NO_ENOBUFS also reduces a "go up, go down" effect in terms of performance which is due to the netlink congestion control when the listener cannot back off. The effect is the following: 1) throughput rate goes up and netlink messages are inserted in the receiver buffer. 2) Then, netlink buffer fills and overruns (set on nlk->state bit 0). 3) While the listener empties the receiver buffer, netlink keeps dropping messages. Thus, throughput goes dramatically down. 4) Then, once the listener has emptied the buffer (nlk->state bit 0 is set off), goto step 1. This effect is easy to trigger with netlink broadcast under heavy load, and it is more noticeable when using a big receiver buffer. You can find some results in [1] that show this problem. [1] http://1984.lsi.us.es/linux/netlink/ This patch also includes the use of sk_drop to account the number of netlink messages drop due to overrun. This value is shown in /proc/net/netlink. Signed-off-by: Pablo Neira Ayuso <pablo@netfilter.org> Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Diffstat (limited to 'include/linux/netlink.h')
-rw-r--r--include/linux/netlink.h1
1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/include/linux/netlink.h b/include/linux/netlink.h
index 1e6bf995435c..5ba398e90304 100644
--- a/include/linux/netlink.h
+++ b/include/linux/netlink.h
@@ -104,6 +104,7 @@ struct nlmsgerr
#define NETLINK_DROP_MEMBERSHIP 2
#define NETLINK_PKTINFO 3
#define NETLINK_BROADCAST_ERROR 4
+#define NETLINK_NO_ENOBUFS 5
struct nl_pktinfo
{