Re: [PATCH net-next v11 17/23] ovpn: add support for peer floating

[Antonio Quartulli <antonio@openvpn.net>]

On 13/11/2024 12:25, Sabrina Dubroca wrote:
> 2024-11-12, 15:03:00 +0100, Antonio Quartulli wrote:
>> On 12/11/2024 11:56, Sabrina Dubroca wrote:
>>> 2024-10-29, 11:47:30 +0100, Antonio Quartulli wrote:
>>>> diff --git a/drivers/net/ovpn/io.c b/drivers/net/ovpn/io.c
>>>> index 63c140138bf98e5d1df79a2565b666d86513323d..0e8a6f2c76bc7b2ccc287ad1187cf50f033bf261 100644
>>>> --- a/drivers/net/ovpn/io.c
>>>> +++ b/drivers/net/ovpn/io.c
>>>> @@ -135,6 +135,15 @@ void ovpn_decrypt_post(void *data, int ret)
>>>>    	/* keep track of last received authenticated packet for keepalive */
>>>>    	peer->last_recv = ktime_get_real_seconds();
>>>> +	if (peer->sock->sock->sk->sk_protocol == IPPROTO_UDP) {
>>>
>>> What prevents peer->sock from being replaced and released
>>> concurrently?
>>
>> Technically nothing.
>> Userspace currently does not even support updating a peer socket at runtime,
>> but I wanted ovpn to be flexible enough from the beginning.
> 
> Is there a reason to do that? With TCP the peer would have to
> reconnect, and I guess fully restart the whole process (become a new
> peer with a new ID etc). With UDP, do you need to replace the socket?

At the moment userspace won't try to do that, but I can foresee some 
future use cases: i.e. a peer that switches to a different interface and 
needs to open a new socket to keep sending data.

Moreover, in userspace we're currently working on multisocket support 
(theoretically server side only), therefore I can imagine a peer 
floating from one socket to the other while keeping the session alive.

This is all work in progress, but not that far in the future.

For TCP, you're right, although at some point we may even implement 
transport reconnections without losing the VPN state (this is not even 
planned, just a brain dump).

> 
>> One approach might be to go back to peer->sock being unmutable and forget
>> about this.
>>
>> OTOH, if we want to keep this flexibility (which I think is nice), I think I
>> should make peer->sock an RCU pointer and access it accordingly.
> 
> You already use kfree_rcu for ovpn_socket, so the only difference
> would be the __rcu annotation and helpers? (+ rcu_read_lock/unlock in
> a few places)
> 
> Adding rcu_read_lock for peer->sock in ovpn_tcp_tx_work looks
> painful... (another place that I missed where things could go bad if
> the socket was updated in the current implementation, btw)
> 
> Maybe save that for later since you don't have a use case for it yet?

I agree with you. I'll make the socket unmutable again and I'll work on 
this later on.

Thanks a lot for digging with me into this.

Regards,

-- 
Antonio Quartulli
OpenVPN Inc.