1 .. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
10 AF_XDP is an address family that is optimized for high performance
13 This document assumes that the reader is familiar with BPF and XDP. If
14 not, the Cilium project has an excellent reference guide at
15 http://cilium.readthedocs.io/en/latest/bpf/.
17 Using the XDP_REDIRECT action from an XDP program, the program can
18 redirect ingress frames to other XDP enabled netdevs, using the
19 bpf_redirect_map() function. AF_XDP sockets enable the possibility for
20 XDP programs to redirect frames to a memory buffer in a user-space
23 An AF_XDP socket (XSK) is created with the normal socket()
24 syscall. Associated with each XSK are two rings: the RX ring and the
25 TX ring. A socket can receive packets on the RX ring and it can send
26 packets on the TX ring. These rings are registered and sized with the
27 setsockopts XDP_RX_RING and XDP_TX_RING, respectively. It is mandatory
28 to have at least one of these rings for each socket. An RX or TX
29 descriptor ring points to a data buffer in a memory area called a
30 UMEM. RX and TX can share the same UMEM so that a packet does not have
31 to be copied between RX and TX. Moreover, if a packet needs to be kept
32 for a while due to a possible retransmit, the descriptor that points
33 to that packet can be changed to point to another and reused right
34 away. This again avoids copying data.
36 The UMEM consists of a number of equally sized chunks. A descriptor in
37 one of the rings references a frame by referencing its addr. The addr
38 is simply an offset within the entire UMEM region. The user space
39 allocates memory for this UMEM using whatever means it feels is most
40 appropriate (malloc, mmap, huge pages, etc). This memory area is then
41 registered with the kernel using the new setsockopt XDP_UMEM_REG. The
42 UMEM also has two rings: the FILL ring and the COMPLETION ring. The
43 fill ring is used by the application to send down addr for the kernel
44 to fill in with RX packet data. References to these frames will then
45 appear in the RX ring once each packet has been received. The
46 completion ring, on the other hand, contains frame addr that the
47 kernel has transmitted completely and can now be used again by user
48 space, for either TX or RX. Thus, the frame addrs appearing in the
49 completion ring are addrs that were previously transmitted using the
50 TX ring. In summary, the RX and FILL rings are used for the RX path
51 and the TX and COMPLETION rings are used for the TX path.
53 The socket is then finally bound with a bind() call to a device and a
54 specific queue id on that device, and it is not until bind is
55 completed that traffic starts to flow.
57 The UMEM can be shared between processes, if desired. If a process
58 wants to do this, it simply skips the registration of the UMEM and its
59 corresponding two rings, sets the XDP_SHARED_UMEM flag in the bind
60 call and submits the XSK of the process it would like to share UMEM
61 with as well as its own newly created XSK socket. The new process will
62 then receive frame addr references in its own RX ring that point to
63 this shared UMEM. Note that since the ring structures are
64 single-consumer / single-producer (for performance reasons), the new
65 process has to create its own socket with associated RX and TX rings,
66 since it cannot share this with the other process. This is also the
67 reason that there is only one set of FILL and COMPLETION rings per
68 UMEM. It is the responsibility of a single process to handle the UMEM.
70 How is then packets distributed from an XDP program to the XSKs? There
71 is a BPF map called XSKMAP (or BPF_MAP_TYPE_XSKMAP in full). The
72 user-space application can place an XSK at an arbitrary place in this
73 map. The XDP program can then redirect a packet to a specific index in
74 this map and at this point XDP validates that the XSK in that map was
75 indeed bound to that device and ring number. If not, the packet is
76 dropped. If the map is empty at that index, the packet is also
77 dropped. This also means that it is currently mandatory to have an XDP
78 program loaded (and one XSK in the XSKMAP) to be able to get any
79 traffic to user space through the XSK.
81 AF_XDP can operate in two different modes: XDP_SKB and XDP_DRV. If the
82 driver does not have support for XDP, or XDP_SKB is explicitly chosen
83 when loading the XDP program, XDP_SKB mode is employed that uses SKBs
84 together with the generic XDP support and copies out the data to user
85 space. A fallback mode that works for any network device. On the other
86 hand, if the driver has support for XDP, it will be used by the AF_XDP
87 code to provide better performance, but there is still a copy of the
93 In order to use an AF_XDP socket, a number of associated objects need
96 Jonathan Corbet has also written an excellent article on LWN,
97 "Accelerating networking with AF_XDP". It can be found at
98 https://lwn.net/Articles/750845/.
103 UMEM is a region of virtual contiguous memory, divided into
104 equal-sized frames. An UMEM is associated to a netdev and a specific
105 queue id of that netdev. It is created and configured (chunk size,
106 headroom, start address and size) by using the XDP_UMEM_REG setsockopt
107 system call. A UMEM is bound to a netdev and queue id, via the bind()
110 An AF_XDP is socket linked to a single UMEM, but one UMEM can have
111 multiple AF_XDP sockets. To share an UMEM created via one socket A,
112 the next socket B can do this by setting the XDP_SHARED_UMEM flag in
113 struct sockaddr_xdp member sxdp_flags, and passing the file descriptor
114 of A to struct sockaddr_xdp member sxdp_shared_umem_fd.
116 The UMEM has two single-producer/single-consumer rings, that are used
117 to transfer ownership of UMEM frames between the kernel and the
118 user-space application.
123 There are a four different kind of rings: Fill, Completion, RX and
124 TX. All rings are single-producer/single-consumer, so the user-space
125 application need explicit synchronization of multiple
126 processes/threads are reading/writing to them.
128 The UMEM uses two rings: Fill and Completion. Each socket associated
129 with the UMEM must have an RX queue, TX queue or both. Say, that there
130 is a setup with four sockets (all doing TX and RX). Then there will be
131 one Fill ring, one Completion ring, four TX rings and four RX rings.
133 The rings are head(producer)/tail(consumer) based rings. A producer
134 writes the data ring at the index pointed out by struct xdp_ring
135 producer member, and increasing the producer index. A consumer reads
136 the data ring at the index pointed out by struct xdp_ring consumer
137 member, and increasing the consumer index.
139 The rings are configured and created via the _RING setsockopt system
140 calls and mmapped to user-space using the appropriate offset to mmap()
141 (XDP_PGOFF_RX_RING, XDP_PGOFF_TX_RING, XDP_UMEM_PGOFF_FILL_RING and
142 XDP_UMEM_PGOFF_COMPLETION_RING).
144 The size of the rings need to be of size power of two.
149 The Fill ring is used to transfer ownership of UMEM frames from
150 user-space to kernel-space. The UMEM addrs are passed in the ring. As
151 an example, if the UMEM is 64k and each chunk is 4k, then the UMEM has
152 16 chunks and can pass addrs between 0 and 64k.
154 Frames passed to the kernel are used for the ingress path (RX rings).
156 The user application produces UMEM addrs to this ring. Note that the
157 kernel will mask the incoming addr. E.g. for a chunk size of 2k, the
158 log2(2048) LSB of the addr will be masked off, meaning that 2048, 2050
159 and 3000 refers to the same chunk.
162 UMEM Completetion Ring
163 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
165 The Completion Ring is used transfer ownership of UMEM frames from
166 kernel-space to user-space. Just like the Fill ring, UMEM indicies are
169 Frames passed from the kernel to user-space are frames that has been
170 sent (TX ring) and can be used by user-space again.
172 The user application consumes UMEM addrs from this ring.
178 The RX ring is the receiving side of a socket. Each entry in the ring
179 is a struct xdp_desc descriptor. The descriptor contains UMEM offset
180 (addr) and the length of the data (len).
182 If no frames have been passed to kernel via the Fill ring, no
183 descriptors will (or can) appear on the RX ring.
185 The user application consumes struct xdp_desc descriptors from this
191 The TX ring is used to send frames. The struct xdp_desc descriptor is
192 filled (index, length and offset) and passed into the ring.
194 To start the transfer a sendmsg() system call is required. This might
195 be relaxed in the future.
197 The user application produces struct xdp_desc descriptors to this
200 XSKMAP / BPF_MAP_TYPE_XSKMAP
201 ----------------------------
203 On XDP side there is a BPF map type BPF_MAP_TYPE_XSKMAP (XSKMAP) that
204 is used in conjunction with bpf_redirect_map() to pass the ingress
207 The user application inserts the socket into the map, via the bpf()
210 Note that if an XDP program tries to redirect to a socket that does
211 not match the queue configuration and netdev, the frame will be
212 dropped. E.g. an AF_XDP socket is bound to netdev eth0 and
213 queue 17. Only the XDP program executing for eth0 and queue 17 will
214 successfully pass data to the socket. Please refer to the sample
215 application (samples/bpf/) in for an example.
220 In order to use AF_XDP sockets there are two parts needed. The
221 user-space application and the XDP program. For a complete setup and
222 usage example, please refer to the sample application. The user-space
223 side is xdpsock_user.c and the XDP side xdpsock_kern.c.
225 Naive ring dequeue and enqueue could look like this::
227 // struct xdp_rxtx_ring {
230 // struct xdp_desc *desc;
233 // struct xdp_umem_ring {
239 // typedef struct xdp_rxtx_ring RING;
240 // typedef struct xdp_umem_ring RING;
242 // typedef struct xdp_desc RING_TYPE;
243 // typedef __u64 RING_TYPE;
245 int dequeue_one(RING *ring, RING_TYPE *item)
247 __u32 entries = *ring->producer - *ring->consumer;
254 *item = ring->desc[*ring->consumer & (RING_SIZE - 1)];
259 int enqueue_one(RING *ring, const RING_TYPE *item)
261 u32 free_entries = RING_SIZE - (*ring->producer - *ring->consumer);
263 if (free_entries == 0)
266 ring->desc[*ring->producer & (RING_SIZE - 1)] = *item;
275 For a more optimized version, please refer to the sample application.
280 There is a xdpsock benchmarking/test application included that
281 demonstrates how to use AF_XDP sockets with both private and shared
282 UMEMs. Say that you would like your UDP traffic from port 4242 to end
283 up in queue 16, that we will enable AF_XDP on. Here, we use ethtool
286 ethtool -N p3p2 rx-flow-hash udp4 fn
287 ethtool -N p3p2 flow-type udp4 src-port 4242 dst-port 4242 \
290 Running the rxdrop benchmark in XDP_DRV mode can then be done
293 samples/bpf/xdpsock -i p3p2 -q 16 -r -N
295 For XDP_SKB mode, use the switch "-S" instead of "-N" and all options
296 can be displayed with "-h", as usual.
301 - Björn Töpel (AF_XDP core)
302 - Magnus Karlsson (AF_XDP core)
306 - Jesper Dangaard Brouer
308 - Jonathan Corbet (LWN coverage)