Requirements

Driver RX hook

Gives us access to packet-data payload before allocating any meta-data structures, like SKBs. This is key to performance, as it allows processing RX “packet-pages” directly out of the driver’s RX ring queue.

Early drop

Early drop is key for the DoS (Denial of Service) mitigation use-cases. It builds upon a principle of spending/investing as few CPU cycles as possible on a packet that will get dropped anyhow.

Doing this “inline”, before delivery to the normal network stack, has the advantage that a packet that does need delivery to the normal network stack can still get all the features and benefits as before; there is thus no need to deploy a bypass facility merely to re-inject “good” packets into the stack again.

Write access to packet data

XDP needs the ability to modify packet data. This is unfortunately often difficult to obtain, as it requires fundamental changes to the driver’s memory model.

Unfortunately most drivers don’t have “writable” packet data as default. This is due to a workaround for performance bottlenecks in both the page-allocator and DMA APIs, which has the side-effect of necessitating read-only packet pages.

Instead, most drivers (currently) allocate both a SKB and a writable memory buffer, in which to copy (“linearise”) the packet headers, and also store skb_shared_info. Then the remaining payload (pointing past the headers just copied) is attached as (read-only) paged data.

Header push and pop

The ability to push (add) or pop (remove) packet headers indirectly depends on write access to packet-data. (One could argue that a pure pop could be implemented by only adjusting the payload offset, thus not needing write access).

This requirement goes hand-in-hand with tunnel encapsulation or decapsulation. It is also relevant for e.g adding a VLAN header, as needed by the Use-case: DDoS scrubber in order to work around the XDP_TX single NIC limitation.

This requirement implies the ability to adjust the packet-data start offset/pointer and packet length. This requires additional data to be returned.

This also has implications for how much headroom drivers should reserve in the SKB.

Page per packet

On RX many NIC drivers split up a memory page, to share it for multiple packets, in-order to conserve memory. Doing so complicates handling and accounting of these memory pages, which affects performance. Particularly the extra atomic refcnt handling needed for the page can hurt performance.

XDP defines upfront a memory model where there is only one packet per page. This simplifies page handling and open up for future extensions.

This requirement also (upfront) result in choosing not to support things like, jumbo-frames, LRO and generally packets split over multiple pages.

In the future, this strict memory model might be relaxed, but for now it is a strict requirement. With a more flexible Capabilities negotiation it might be possible to negotiate another memory model. Given some specific XDP use-case might not require this strict memory model.

Packet forwarding

Implementing a router/forwarding data plane is DPDK’s prime example for demonstrating superior performance. For the sheer ability to compare against DPDK, XDP also needs a forwarding capability.

RX bulking