Commit 09204a6c authored by Sowmini Varadhan's avatar Sowmini Varadhan Committed by David S. Miller

Documentation: RDS: Document Multipath RDS (mprds)

Document the design of mprds, covering a brief description
of the motivation, data-structures and modifications to the
RDS control plane.
Acked-by: default avatarSantosh Shilimkar <santosh.shilimkar@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarSowmini Varadhan <sowmini.varadhan@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
parent d67214a2
......@@ -365,4 +365,59 @@ The recv path
handle CMSGs
return to application
Multipath RDS (mprds)
=====================
Mprds is multipathed-RDS, primarily intended for RDS-over-TCP
(though the concept can be extended to other transports). The classical
implementation of RDS-over-TCP is implemented by demultiplexing multiple
PF_RDS sockets between any 2 endpoints (where endpoint == [IP address,
port]) over a single TCP socket between the 2 IP addresses involved. This
has the limitation that it ends up funneling multiple RDS flows over a
single TCP flow, thus it is
(a) upper-bounded to the single-flow bandwidth,
(b) suffers from head-of-line blocking for all the RDS sockets.
Better throughput (for a fixed small packet size, MTU) can be achieved
by having multiple TCP/IP flows per rds/tcp connection, i.e., multipathed
RDS (mprds). Each such TCP/IP flow constitutes a path for the rds/tcp
connection. RDS sockets will be attached to a path based on some hash
(e.g., of local address and RDS port number) and packets for that RDS
socket will be sent over the attached path using TCP to segment/reassemble
RDS datagrams on that path.
Multipathed RDS is implemented by splitting the struct rds_connection into
a common (to all paths) part, and a per-path struct rds_conn_path. All
I/O workqs and reconnect threads are driven from the rds_conn_path.
Transports such as TCP that are multipath capable may then set up a
TPC socket per rds_conn_path, and this is managed by the transport via
the transport privatee cp_transport_data pointer.
Transports announce themselves as multipath capable by setting the
t_mp_capable bit during registration with the rds core module. When the
transport is multipath-capable, rds_sendmsg() hashes outgoing traffic
across multiple paths. The outgoing hash is computed based on the
local address and port that the PF_RDS socket is bound to.
Additionally, even if the transport is MP capable, we may be
peering with some node that does not support mprds, or supports
a different number of paths. As a result, the peering nodes need
to agree on the number of paths to be used for the connection.
This is done by sending out a control packet exchange before the
first data packet. The control packet exchange must have completed
prior to outgoing hash completion in rds_sendmsg() when the transport
is mutlipath capable.
The control packet is an RDS ping packet (i.e., packet to rds dest
port 0) with the ping packet having a rds extension header option of
type RDS_EXTHDR_NPATHS, length 2 bytes, and the value is the
number of paths supported by the sender. The "probe" ping packet will
get sent from some reserved port, RDS_FLAG_PROBE_PORT (in <linux/rds.h>)
The receiver of a ping from RDS_FLAG_PROBE_PORT will thus immediately
be able to compute the min(sender_paths, rcvr_paths). The pong
sent in response to a probe-ping should contain the rcvr's npaths
when the rcvr is mprds-capable.
If the rcvr is not mprds-capable, the exthdr in the ping will be
ignored. In this case the pong will not have any exthdrs, so the sender
of the probe-ping can default to single-path mprds.
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