netfilter: conntrack: optional reliable conntrack event delivery

This patch improves ctnetlink event reliability if one broadcast
listener has set the NETLINK_BROADCAST_ERROR socket option.

The logic is the following: if an event delivery fails, we keep
the undelivered events in the missed event cache. Once the next
packet arrives, we add the new events (if any) to the missed
events in the cache and we try a new delivery, and so on. Thus,
if ctnetlink fails to deliver an event, we try to deliver them
once we see a new packet. Therefore, we may lose state
transitions but the userspace process gets in sync at some point.

At worst case, if no events were delivered to userspace, we make
sure that destroy events are successfully delivered. Basically,
if ctnetlink fails to deliver the destroy event, we remove the
conntrack entry from the hashes and we insert them in the dying
list, which contains inactive entries. Then, the conntrack timer
is added with an extra grace timeout of random32() % 15 seconds
to trigger the event again (this grace timeout is tunable via
/proc). The use of a limited random timeout value allows
distributing the "destroy" resends, thus, avoiding accumulating
lots "destroy" events at the same time. Event delivery may
re-order but we can identify them by means of the tuple plus
the conntrack ID.

The maximum number of conntrack entries (active or inactive) is
still handled by nf_conntrack_max. Thus, we may start dropping
packets at some point if we accumulate a lot of inactive conntrack
entries that did not successfully report the destroy event to
userspace.

During my stress tests consisting of setting a very small buffer
of 2048 bytes for conntrackd and the NETLINK_BROADCAST_ERROR socket
flag, and generating lots of very small connections, I noticed
very few destroy entries on the fly waiting to be resend.

A simple way to test this patch consist of creating a lot of
entries, set a very small Netlink buffer in conntrackd (+ a patch
which is not in the git tree to set the BROADCAST_ERROR flag)
and invoke `conntrack -F'.

For expectations, no changes are introduced in this patch.
Currently, event delivery is only done for new expectations (no
events from expectation expiration, removal and confirmation).
In that case, they need a per-expectation event cache to implement
the same idea that is exposed in this patch.

This patch can be useful to provide reliable flow-accouting. We
still have to add a new conntrack extension to store the creation
and destroy time.

Signed-off-by: Pablo Neira Ayuso <pablo@netfilter.org>
Signed-off-by: Patrick McHardy <kaber@trash.net>

1 files changed, 26 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_ecache.c b/net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_ecache.c
index 683281b78047..aee560b4768d 100644
--- a/net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_ecache.c
+++ b/net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_ecache.c
@@ -56,8 +56,21 @@ void nf_ct_deliver_cached_events(struct nf_conn *ct)
 			.pid	= 0,
 			.report	= 0
 		};
-
-		notify->fcn(events, &item);
+		int ret;
+		/* We make a copy of the missed event cache without taking
+		 * the lock, thus we may send missed events twice. However,
+		 * this does not harm and it happens very rarely. */
+		unsigned long missed = e->missed;
+
+		ret = notify->fcn(events | missed, &item);
+		if (unlikely(ret < 0 || missed)) {
+			spin_lock_bh(&ct->lock);
+			if (ret < 0)
+				e->missed |= events;
+			else
+				e->missed &= ~missed;
+			spin_unlock_bh(&ct->lock);
+		} 
 	}
 
 out_unlock:
@@ -133,6 +146,7 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(nf_ct_expect_unregister_notifier);
 
 #define NF_CT_EVENTS_DEFAULT 1
 static int nf_ct_events __read_mostly = NF_CT_EVENTS_DEFAULT;
+static int nf_ct_events_retry_timeout __read_mostly = 15*HZ;
 
 #ifdef CONFIG_SYSCTL
 static struct ctl_table event_sysctl_table[] = {
@@ -144,6 +158,14 @@ static struct ctl_table event_sysctl_table[] = {
 		.mode		= 0644,
 		.proc_handler	= proc_dointvec,
 	},
+	{
+		.ctl_name	= CTL_UNNUMBERED,
+		.procname	= "nf_conntrack_events_retry_timeout",
+		.data		= &init_net.ct.sysctl_events_retry_timeout,
+		.maxlen		= sizeof(unsigned int),
+		.mode		= 0644,
+		.proc_handler	= proc_dointvec_jiffies,
+	},
 	{}
 };
 #endif /* CONFIG_SYSCTL */
@@ -165,6 +187,7 @@ static int nf_conntrack_event_init_sysctl(struct net *net)
 		goto out;
 
 	table[0].data = &net->ct.sysctl_events;
+	table[1].data = &net->ct.sysctl_events_retry_timeout;
 
 	net->ct.event_sysctl_header =
 		register_net_sysctl_table(net,
@@ -205,6 +228,7 @@ int nf_conntrack_ecache_init(struct net *net)
 	int ret;
 
 	net->ct.sysctl_events = nf_ct_events;
+	net->ct.sysctl_events_retry_timeout = nf_ct_events_retry_timeout;
 
 	if (net_eq(net, &init_net)) {
 		ret = nf_ct_extend_register(&event_extend);