Re: [PATCH RFC net-next v4 6/8] virtio/vsock: support dgrams

From: Arseniy Krasnov
Date: Thu Jun 22 2023 - 14:46:41 EST




On 22.06.2023 19:09, Stefano Garzarella wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 11, 2023 at 11:49:02PM +0300, Arseniy Krasnov wrote:
>> Hello Bobby!
>>
>> On 10.06.2023 03:58, Bobby Eshleman wrote:
>>> This commit adds support for datagrams over virtio/vsock.
>>>
>>> Message boundaries are preserved on a per-skb and per-vq entry basis.
>>
>> I'm a little bit confused about the following case: let vhost sends 4097 bytes
>> datagram to the guest. Guest uses 4096 RX buffers in it's virtio queue, each
>> buffer has attached empty skb to it. Vhost places first 4096 bytes to the first
>> buffer of guests RX queue, and 1 last byte to the second buffer. Now IIUC guest
>> has two skb in it rx queue, and user in guest wants to read data - does it read
>> 4097 bytes, while guest has two skb - 4096 bytes and 1 bytes? In seqpacket there is
>> special marker in header which shows where message ends, and how it works here?
>
> I think the main difference is that DGRAM is not connection-oriented, so
> we don't have a stream and we can't split the packet into 2 (maybe we
> could, but we have no guarantee that the second one for example will be
> not discarded because there is no space).
>
> So I think it is acceptable as a restriction to keep it simple.

Ah, I see, idea is that any "corruptions" of data could be considered as
"DGRAM is not reliable anyway, so that's it" :)

>
> My only doubt is, should we make the RX buffer size configurable,
> instead of always using 4k?

I guess this is useful only for DGRAM usage, when we want to tune buffers
for some specific case - may be for exact length of messages (for example if we have
4096 buffers, while senders wants to send 5000 bytes always by each 'send()' - I think it
will be really strange that reader ALWAYS dequeues 4096 and 4 bytes as two packets).
For stream types of socket I think size of rx buffers is not big deal in most of cases.

Thanks, Arseniy

>
> Thanks,
> Stefano
>