IPv6 BGP & kernel 4.19

[Basil Fillan]

Hi,

We've also experienced this after upgrading a few routers to Debian 
Buster. With a kernel bisect we found that a bug was introduced in the 
following commit:

3b6761d18bc11f2af2a6fc494e9026d39593f22c

This bug was still present in master as of a few weeks ago.

It appears entries are added to the IPv6 route cache which aren't 
visible from "ip -6 route show cache", but are causing the route cache 
garbage collection system to trigger extremely often (every packet?) 
once it exceeds the value of net.ipv6.route.max_size. Our original 
symptom was extreme forwarding jitter caused within the ip6_dst_gc 
function (identified by some spelunking with systemtap & perf) worsening 
as the size of the cache increased. This was due to our max_size sysctl 
inadvertently being set to 1 million. Reducing this value to the default 
4096 broke IPv6 forwarding entirely on our test system under affected 
kernels. Our documentation had this sysctl marked as the maximum number 
of IPv6 routes, so it looks like the use changed at some point.

We've rolled our routers back to kernel 4.9 (with the sysctl set to 
4096) for now, which fixed our immediate issue.

You can reproduce this by adding more than 4096 (default value of the 
sysctl) routes to the kernel and running "ip route get" for each of 
them. Once the route cache is filled, the error "RTNETLINK answers: 
Network is unreachable" will be received for each subsequent "ip route 
get" incantation, and v6 connectivity will be interrupted.

Thanks,

Basil


On 26/02/2020 20:38, Clément Guivy wrote:
> Hi, did anyone find a solution or workaround regarding this issue? 
> Considering a router use case.
> I have looked at rt6_stats, total route count is around 78k (full view), 
> and around 4100 entries in the cache at the moment on my first router 
> (forwarding a few Mb/s) and around 2500 entries on my second router 
> (forwarding less than 1 Mb/s).
> I have reread the entire thread. At first, Alarig's research seemed to 
> lead to a neighbor management problem, my understanding is that route 
> cache is something else entirely - or is it related somehow?
> 
> 
> On 03/12/2019 19:29, Alarig Le Lay wrote:
>> We agree then, and I act as a router on all those machines.
>>
>> Le 3 décembre 2019 19:27:11 GMT+01:00, Vincent Bernat 
>> <vincent at bernat.ch> a écrit :
>>
>>     This is the result of PMTUd. But when you are a router, you don't
>>     need to do that, so it's mostly a problem for end hosts.
>>
>>     On December 3, 2019 7:05:49 PM GMT+01:00, Alarig Le Lay
>>     <alarig at swordarmor.fr> wrote:
>>
>>         On 03/12/2019 14:16, Vincent Bernat wrote:
>>
>>             The information needs to be stored somewhere.
>>
>>
>>         Why has it to be stored? It’s not really my problem if someone 
>> else has
>>         a non-stantard MTU and can’t do TCP-MSS or PMTUd.