In the MP-safe world, a rtentry stemming from a rtcache can be freed at any
points. So we need to protect rtentries somehow say by reference couting or
passive references. Regardless of the method, we need to call some release
function of a rtentry after using it.
The change adds a new function rtcache_unref to release a rtentry. At this
point, this function does nothing because for now we don't add a reference
to a rtentry when we get one from a rtcache. We will add something useful
in a further commit.
This change is a part of changes for MP-safe routing table. It is separated
to avoid one big change that makes difficult to debug by bisecting.
Having a pointer of an interface in a mbuf isn't safe if we remove big
kernel locks; an interface object (ifnet) can be destroyed anytime in any
packet processing and accessing such object via a pointer is racy. Instead
we have to get an object from the interface collection (ifindex2ifnet) via
an interface index (if_index) that is stored to a mbuf instead of an
pointer.
The change provides two APIs: m_{get,put}_rcvif_psref that use psref(9)
for sleep-able critical sections and m_{get,put}_rcvif that use
pserialize(9) for other critical sections. The change also adds another
API called m_get_rcvif_NOMPSAFE, that is NOT MP-safe and for transition
moratorium, i.e., it is intended to be used for places where are not
planned to be MP-ified soon.
The change adds some overhead due to psref to performance sensitive paths,
however the overhead is not serious, 2% down at worst.
Proposed on tech-kern and tech-net.
The API is used to set (or reset) a received interface of a mbuf.
They are counterpart of m_get_rcvif, which will come in another
commit, hide internal of rcvif operation, and reduce the diff of
the upcoming change.
No functional change.
The change ensures that ifnet objects in the ifnet list aren't freed during
list iterations by using pserialize(9) and psref(9).
Note that the change adds a pslist(9) for ifnet but doesn't remove the
original ifnet list (ifnet_list) to avoid breaking kvm(3) users. We
shouldn't use the original list in the kernel anymore.
rjs