buglwIP - A Lightweight TCP/IP stack - Bugs: bug #61097, Deadlock due to inability to...

 
 

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bug #61097: Deadlock due to inability to receive ACKs when all pbufs are full

Submitter:  Christopher Head <hawk777>
Submitted:  Wed 01 Sep 2021 03:33:33 AM UTC
   
 
Category:  TCP Severity:  3 - Normal
Item Group:  Faulty Behaviour Status:  None
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  None
Open/Closed:  Open Planned Release:  None
lwIP version:  Other

Thu 02 Sep 2021 03:36:29 AM UTC, comment #1: 

I realized later on that everything I just said only applies if you do full-stack zero-copy receives, by having the application keep the pbufs it’s given in the tcp_recv callback until it’s ready to process them. If the application instead adds a copying step, where it copies data from those pbufs into a separate buffer, then that separate buffer only needs to be one window-size long, it doesn’t need to be one window-size times the receive chunk size; so, if you’re OK with losing full zero-copy, this isn’t actually a big problem (and saying that each socket needs a window-sized buffer is totally reasonable).

Christopher Head <hawk777>
Wed 01 Sep 2021 03:33:33 AM UTC, original submission:  

Consider an application that works in strict command-response mode; that is, it receives a command, executes it, sends a response to the client, and then goes back to receive the next command. Consider a client that sends commands, but doesn’t read responses. Here’s what will happen; let’s say the client sending the commands is running Linux:
1. Responses start piling up in the Linux receive buffer. The TCP window for the lwIP→Linux direction closes, but for now data is ACKed, so it gets removed from the lwIP send queue.
2. The window closes completely. The application keeps generating responses until the send queue is full.
3. tcp_sndbuf starts returning zero, so the application stops reading commands—it intends to wait until the client has consumed some of the responses, opening up window and send queue space, and then carry on as usual, with no commands or responses lost, using TCP as flow control.
4. Because the application has stopped reading commands, they start piling up in the receive buffers.

Up to this point, everything works pretty much the same way on any operating system. The problem comes when all the storage available (either lwIP heap space for receive buffers, or dedicated receive buffers if you’re doing a zero-copy driver, or lwIP heap space for receive pbuf structures, or whatever) is exhausted. At this point:
5. The Linux client starts reading responses.
6. The Linux kernel sends ACKs reporting the opening of more window, which should allow lwIP to send more response data.
7. There are no {buffers, pbufs} available in lwIP, therefore it can’t receive the ACKs!

The obvious way to avoid this seemed to me to have enough receive buffer space to hold a maximum-window-size of receive data. But then I realized, what if the Linux client sends one byte per segment? The TCP window size is measured in bytes, but by sending one byte per segment, lwIP has to expend an entire “struct pbuf” (and, in the case of zero-copy hardware, whatever chunk buffer size the driver uses) per byte of window—in other words, even with an unusually small, say, 500-byte window, you’d need enough heap space for 500 “struct pbuf”s at minimum, just to avoid deadlock with one single TCP connection.

It seems to me that lwIP needs to have some kind of escape hatch, where either the heap or the driver or something communicates to the TCP layer that it’s running out of space, and at that point the TCP layer acts on the control portion of incoming packets (e.g. ACK numbers, FIN/RST flags, etc.) but doesn’t keep stashing (and ACKing) the incoming data.

Or, maybe it should have an option to coalesce tiny pbufs in the receive queue into a smaller number of larger pbufs, so that it’s possible to get a better picture of the relationship between receive window and memory consumption and set up a large enough heap?

As far as I can tell, there isn’t anything the application side can do to mitigate this, other than discard responses if there isn’t room in the send queue, which rather defeats the point of considering TCP to be reliable and to have flow control—and applications written this way work just fine in full operating systems like Linux, though I’m not sure how the Linux kernel actually avoids this problem (I assume the answer may involve having gobs and gobs of memory available, possibly in combination with coalescing incoming data).

Version is 2.1.2 but that’s missing from the dropdown.

Christopher Head <hawk777>

 

(Note: upload size limit is set to 16384 kB, after insertion of the required escape characters.)

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