Re: [RFC PATCH net-next] netfilter: nf_conntrack: add ct expression support for netdev egress chains

[Hari Chandrakanthan <hari.chandrakanthan@oss.qualcomm.com>]

On 10/16/2026 5:31 PM, Florian Westphal wrote:
> Hari Chandrakanthan <hari.chandrakanthan@oss.qualcomm.com> wrote:
>> By netdev/egress only, I mean that the nft rule with a ct expression
>> (e.g., ct mark set) is present only in the egress chain for a netdev,
>> with no other nft conntrack rules in inet or bridge chains.
>>
>> For example, it may be possible that only rules similar to the below
>> nft rules are added at the netdev egress chain, with no other ct rule
>> in inet or bridge hooks.
>>
>> nft add table netdev qos_table
>>
>> nft add chain netdev qos_table wlan0_qos \
>>       { type filter hook egress device "wlan0" priority 0\; }
>>
>> nft add rule netdev qos_table wlan0_qos \
>>       ether daddr 00:03:7f:01:50:65 \
>>       ip saddr 192.168.1.10 \
>>       ip daddr 192.168.1.20 \
>>       ip protocol tcp \
>>       tcp sport 12345 \
>>       tcp dport 443 \
>>       ct mark set 0x10
>>
>>> Where are the skbs coming from, i.e. though what pipeline?
>>>
>>> Bridge?
>>> Routing?
>> In the use case that we are trying to address, the device is a Wi-Fi
>> access point router. It receives the classification rules from a Wi-Fi
>> client device for QoS prioritization of down-link traffic to the client
>> (n-tuple to Wi-Fi TID mappings) via SCS. We would like to apply these
>> classification rules on the access point router using nft rules
>> (ct/skb mark set rules) at the WLAN netdev's egress chain.
> I still see no reason to ever conntrack.  Is this for 'sticky'
> skb->mark ?
>
> I think conntrack for that is waaay too much overhead and would
> use a nft map for this.

   As I understand, an nft map would work for a fixed-tuple classifier 
requirement
   (for eg 5 tuple only), but the Wi-Fi SCS protocol  allows clients to 
push classification
   rules with anywhere from one to five tuple fields. In a real Access 
Point deployment
   with multiple clients connected simultaneously, each pushing their 
own classifier
   rule sets, using maps would require to maintain multiple maps per 
client and
   keep them in sync with client connect and disconnect events makes the 
management
   more complex.

>>>> To address this, as suggested by Pablo, we are considering enabling
>>>> conntrack lookup/creation at
>>>> netdev/ingress. This would allow netdev chains to access conntrack state
>>>> without requiring conntrack
>>>> to be enabled for the inet or bridge families, avoiding unnecessary
>>>> overhead for netdev-only use cases.
>>> FWIW bridge conntrack is already problematic (see recent RFC patch
>>> to refag in INPUT, conntrack is pretty much routing-only.
>>>
>>>> Kindly share your thoughts on this approach.
>>> I think you'd have to explain your use case.
>>>
>>> I thought you only want
>>>
>>> skb-> mark = ct->mark
>>>
>>> from egress. That would imply something else already enabled conntrack
>>> anyway, else you'd have no conntrack marks set that you could read.
>> As mentioned in the previous comment, in the use case that we are
>> trying to address, the device is a Wi-Fi access point router. It
>> receives classification rules from a Wi-Fi client device for
>> prioritizing downlink traffic to the client (n-tuple to Wi-Fi TID
>> mappings) via SCS. We would like to apply these rules on the access
>> point router using nft rules (ct/skb mark set rules) at the WLAN
>> netdev egress chain.
>> The nft rules at netdev egress chain achieve the below functionality:
>> 1. If connmark is not set on the first skb seen by the rule,
>>      perform flow classification (based on dmac addr and n-tuple) and
>> store the result in the ct's mark via ct mark set. Typically, this rule
>> will be skipped when the connmark is already set for the flow.
>> 2. If connmark is already set (for subsequent packets), copy it to
>>      skb->mark. Ideally, only this rule should be processed by the vast
>>      majority of packets for the flow.
>> There are three advantages we see in this solution for this use case:
>> 1. We wanted to avoid incurring the cost of n-tuple match for every
>>      single packet at the netdev egress hook, by applying the
>>      classification rule (tuple match and connmark set) only for the
>> first packets until connmark is set.
> Hmmm.  Conntrack has overhead.  Did you check that bringing
> in conntrack into the picture really saves cycles?
>
> If you assume conntrack is already active anyway to provide NAT, etc,
> then my point is moot.  But in that case all that is needed is to
> permit retrieving ct->mark in netdev egress chains, which is much
> simpler and doesn't require conntrack enablement.

I agree, in a typical AP deployment running NAT/firewall, conntrack is 
already active, and
that is the case we want to address now.

I will revise the patch to simply allow ct expression evaluation at
netdev egress chains without enabling any conntracks.

>
>> 2. Adding the rules at the egress hook of the netdev restricts the
>>      scope of these rules only to packets egressing the netdev of
>>      interest, without incurring the cost of processing these rules for
>>      traffic egressing on other netdevs in the system or other hooks.
> I think that IFF you really need to bring in full-blown conntrack, then
> Pablos proposal makes sense.
>
> However, I think that we really have to make many more changes to
> make this work, even to existing bridge conntrack support.
>
> As-is, bridge conntrack is no 'works out of the box' solution, it
> requires extra setup (conntrack zones) to separate VLANs or you risk
> unwanted cross-vlan-traffic.
>
> I think we'd have to bring at least the vlan id into the nf_conn
> entry and auto-separate such entries if request is coming from
> bridge resp. netdev hook.

Yes, we looked into this. Without VLAN context in the conntrack,
two flows with identical 5-tuples on different VLANs will share an 
nf_conn entry.

We looked at what is needed to address this: the VLAN ID needs to be 
carried
through the full conntrack pipeline — tuple extraction, hashing, lookup,
netlink support for userspace, and flow offload.

We will work on the basic support for this VLAN solution and submit the 
patches
once they are tested to get more feedback. The patch to create/lookup ct at
netdev ingress support would then depend on it.

Does this direction look reasonable to you?