An MPLS packet may in transit receive additional labels. I most cases (all?), this will be most properly seen as a LSP hierarchy (tunneling one LSP into another LSP), so closer to a notion of ingress rather than something related to the initial LSP. But I don't know if the distinction is of importance.

The cases that comes to mind would be:
- tunneling into a fast-reroute bypass LSP (possibly a segment routing LSP, see segment routing TI LFA)
- seamless MPLS
- carrier's carrier type of deployment


<Rodny> I would add SR-policy as the most generic example. Ideally, any router along the path, being the (real / app-facing) head-end or not, should be capable of injecting a SID-list to enforce any given forwarding policy. So i believe that David’s patch is needed as is: to cover both ip->mpls and mpls->mpls scenarios.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-filsfils-spring-segment-routing-policy



How does this compare with running the packet a couple of times through
the mpls table to get all of the desired labels applied?


<Rodny> I would like to know more about this one too.


/Rodny


On Mar 26, 2017, at 3:23 PM, David Ahern via frr <frr@lists.nox.tf> wrote:


From: 
David Ahern <dsa@cumulusnetworks.com>
Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: [PATCH net-next 0/4] net: mpls: Allow users to configure more labels per route
Date: March 26, 2017 at 3:22:51 PM PDT
To: Thomas Morin <thomas.morin@orange.com>, DUGEON Olivier IMT/OLN <olivier.dugeon@orange.com>, "amine.kherbouche@6wind.com" <amine.kherbouche@6wind.com>, "jefftant@gmail.com" <jefftant@gmail.com>, "frr@lists.nox.tf" <frr@lists.nox.tf>, Bruno Decraene <bruno.decraene@orange.com>, roopa <roopa@cumulusnetworks.com>


On 3/26/17 11:02 AM, Thomas Morin wrote:
Hi David,

[adding my colleague Bruno to the list, he may correct things I might
have oversimplified on segment routing, or have a idea about 12]

2017-03-25, David Ahern:
Eric's question below is basically adding labels at tunnel ingress vs
while traversing the LSP. I was generically increasing both to more than
2 labels. Opinions?

An MPLS packet may in transit receive additional labels. I most cases
(all?), this will be most properly seen as a LSP hierarchy (tunneling
one LSP into another LSP), so closer to a notion of ingress rather than
something related to the initial LSP. But I don't know if the
distinction is of importance.

The cases that comes to mind would be:
- tunneling into a fast-reroute bypass LSP (possibly a segment routing
LSP, see segment routing TI LFA)
- seamless MPLS
- carrier's carrier type of deployment

In these cases a router could receive an MPLS packet, and possibly after
popping the topmost, push a stack of labels onto the packet.

And that's my takeaway from past discussions on this topic (number of
labels).


About the email below:
- how did 12 end up being considered "covering all currently known
segment routing use cases" ? it seems that SR could use an arbitrary
number of labels  (not saying 12 is a bad number, but...)

I believe the consensus was 8 but Olivier had a use case for more. The
way I have this coded means the performance impact is to users adding
more and more labels - which is expected and appropriate.


- I'm not sure what Eric's idea of "running the packet a couple of times
through the mpls table to get all of the desired labels applied" would
mean: after the first lookup, what data would be used as key for the
following lookup ?

no idea. I need him to clarify.


- back to your question, which seems to imply one could possibly
increase number of labels for ingress without increasing number of
labels for transit: isn't the same datastructure used in both to
represent an mpls next hop (in RFC3031, both the ILM and FTN point to
NHLFE entries, but I haven't digged enough to identify how these maps to
the kernel implementation)

no. Ingress is handled by a lightweight tunnel infrastructure. In 'ip'
terms the route specifies lwt with mpls encap. LSP MPLS is handled as a
typical protocol family with its own route database.

- would a concept of a linked list of mpls_nh make sense, each with one
label to impose, make sense, so that no hard limit is put on the label
stack depth?

each nexthop has its own label stack. The nexthops are essentially an
array at the end of the mpls route.



_______________________________________________
frr mailing list
frr@lists.nox.tf
https://lists.nox.tf/listinfo/frr



On Mar 26, 2017, at 1:16 PM, Jeff Tantsura <jefftant@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Thomas,

Good points.

There’s no free lunch in fast path universe, packet recalculation has price associated with it, the most obvious things are increased latency and reduced throughput, there’s more.
Sorry for repeating myself - not being linux kernel expert myself - I’d appreciate pros/cons analysis of taking different approaches, the impact of adding new code and system behavior with it.

Those who expect the underlying platform to be not X86 only (Cumulus?) what are your expectation from HAL/ HW SDK prospective?  

Cheers,
Jeff


On Mar 26, 2017, at 12:02, Thomas Morin <thomas.morin@orange.com> wrote:

Hi David,

[adding my colleague Bruno to the list, he may correct things I might have oversimplified on segment routing, or have a idea about 12]

2017-03-25, David Ahern:
Eric's question below is basically adding labels at tunnel ingress vs
while traversing the LSP. I was generically increasing both to more than
2 labels. Opinions?

An MPLS packet may in transit receive additional labels. I most cases (all?), this will be most properly seen as a LSP hierarchy (tunneling one LSP into another LSP), so closer to a notion of ingress rather than something related to the initial LSP. But I don't know if the distinction is of importance.

The cases that comes to mind would be:
- tunneling into a fast-reroute bypass LSP (possibly a segment routing LSP, see segment routing TI LFA)
- seamless MPLS
- carrier's carrier type of deployment

In these cases a router could receive an MPLS packet, and possibly after popping the topmost, push a stack of labels onto the packet.

About the email below:
- how did 12 end up being considered "covering all currently known segment routing use cases" ? it seems that SR could use an arbitrary number of labels  (not saying 12 is a bad number, but...)
- I'm not sure what Eric's idea of "running the packet a couple of times through the mpls table to get all of the desired labels applied" would mean: after the first lookup, what data would be used as key for the following lookup ?
- back to your question, which seems to imply one could possibly increase number of labels for ingress without increasing number of labels for transit: isn't the same datastructure used in both to represent an mpls next hop (in RFC3031, both the ILM and FTN point to NHLFE entries, but I haven't digged enough to identify how these maps to the kernel implementation)
- would a concept of a linked list of mpls_nh make sense, each with one label to impose, make sense, so that no hard limit is put on the label stack depth?

-Thomas



-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next 0/4] net: mpls: Allow users to configure
more labels per route
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2017 14:15:54 -0500
From: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
To: David Ahern <dsa@cumulusnetworks.com>
CC: netdev@vger.kernel.org, roopa@cumulusnetworks.com, rshearma@brocade.com

David Ahern <dsa@cumulusnetworks.com> writes:

Bump the maximum number of labels for MPLS routes from 2 to 12. To keep
memory consumption in check the labels array is moved to the end of mpls_nh
and mpls_iptunnel_encap structs as a 0-sized array. Allocations use the
maximum number of labels across all nexthops in a route for LSR and the
number of labels configured for LWT.

The mpls_route layout is changed to:

 +----------------------+
 | mpls_route           |
 +----------------------+
 | mpls_nh 0            |
 +----------------------+
 | alignment padding    |   4 bytes for odd number of labels; 0 for even
 +----------------------+
 | via[rt_max_alen] 0   |
 +----------------------+
 | alignment padding    |   via's aligned on sizeof(unsigned long)
 +----------------------+
 | ...                  |

Meaning the via follows its mpls_nh providing better locality as the
number of labels increases. UDP_RR tests with namespaces shows no impact
to a modest performance increase with this layout for 1 or 2 labels and
1 or 2 nexthops.

The new limit is set to 12 to cover all currently known segment
routing use cases.

How does this compare with running the packet a couple of times through
the mpls table to get all of the desired labels applied?

I can certainly see the case in an mpls tunnel ingress where this might
could be desirable.    Which is something you implement in your last
patch.  However is it at all common to push lots of labels at once
during routing?

I am probably a bit naive but it seems absurd to push more
than a handful of labels onto a packet as you are routing it.

Eric




_______________________________________________
frr mailing list
frr@lists.nox.tf
https://lists.nox.tf/listinfo/frr