Ubuntu Manpage: RDS - Reliable Datagram Sockets

Provided by: rds-tools_1.4.1-OFED-1.4.2-1ubuntu1_amd64

NAME

       RDS - Reliable Datagram Sockets

SYNOPSIS

       #include <sys/socket.h>
       #include <netinet/in.h>

DESCRIPTION

This is an implementation of the RDS socket API. It provides reliable, in-order datagram
delivery between sockets over a variety of transports.

Currently, RDS can be transported over Infiniband, and loopback. RDS over TCP is
disabled, but will be re-enabled in the near future.

RDS uses standard AF_INET addresses as described in ip(7) to identify end points.

Socket Creation
RDS is still in development and as such does not have a reserved protocol family constant.
Applications must read the string representation of the protocol family value from the
pf_rds sysctl parameter file described below.

rds_socket = socket(pf_rds, SOCK_SEQPACKET, 0);

Socket Options
RDS sockets support a number of socket options through the setsockopt(2) and getsockopt(2)
calls. The following generic options (with socket level SOL_SOCKET) are of specific
importance:

SO_RCVBUF
Specifies the size of the receive buffer. See section on "Congestion Control"
below.

SO_SNDBUF
Specifies the size of the send buffer. See "Message Transmission" below.

SO_SNDTIMEO
Specifies the send timeout when trying to enqueue a message on a socket with a full
queue in blocking mode.

In addition to these, RDS supports a number of protocol specific options (with socket
level SOL_RDS). Just as with the RDS protocol family, an official value has not been
assigned yet, so the kernel will assign a value dynamically. The assigned value can be
retrieved from the sol_rds sysctl parameter file.

RDS specific socket options will be described in a separate section below.

Binding
A new RDS socket has no local address when it is first returned from socket(2). It must
be bound to a local address by calling bind(2) before any messages can be sent or
received. This will also attach the socket to a specific transport, based on the type of
interface the local address is attached to. From that point on, the socket can only reach
destinations which are available through this transport.

For instance, when binding to the address of an Infiniband interface such as ib0, the
socket will use the Infiniband transport. If RDS is not able to associate a transport with
the given address, it will return EADDRNOTAVAIL.

An RDS socket can only be bound to one address and only one socket can be bound to a given
address/port pair. If no port is specified in the binding address then an unbound port is
selected at random.

RDS does not allow the application to bind a previously bound socket to another address.
Binding to the wildcard address INADDR_ANY is not permitted either.

Connecting
The default mode of operation for RDS is to use unconnected socket, and specify a
destination address as an argument to sendmsg. However, RDS allows sockets to be
connected to a remote end point using connect(2). If a socket is connected, calling
sendmsg without specifying a destination address will use the previously given remote
address.

Congestion Control
RDS does not have explicit congestion control like common streaming protocols such as TCP.
However, sockets have two queue limits associated with them; the send queue size and the
receive queue size. Messages are accounted based on the number of bytes of payload.

The send queue size limits how much data local processes can queue on a local socket (see
the following section). If that limit is exceeded, the kernel will not accept further
messages until the queue is drained and messages have been delivered to and acknowledged
by the remote host.

The receive queue size limits how much data RDS will put on the receive queue of a socket
before marking the socket as congested. When a socket becomes congested, RDS will send a
congestion map update to the other participating hosts, who are then expected to stop
sending more messages to this port.

There is a timing window during which a remote host can still continue to send messages to
a congested port; RDS solves this by accepting these messages even if the socket's receive
queue is already over the limit.

As the application pulls incoming messages off the receive queue using recvmsg(2), the
number of bytes on the receive queue will eventually drop below the receive queue size, at
which point the port is then marked uncongested, and another congestion update is sent to
all participating hosts. This tells them to allow applications to send additional messages
to this port.

The default values for the send and receive buffer size are controlled by the A given RDS
socket has limited transmit buffer space. It defaults to the system wide socket send
buffer size set in the wmem_default and rmem_default sysctls, respectively. They can be
tuned by the application through the SO_SNDBUF and SO_RCVBUF socket options.

Blocking Behavior
The sendmsg(2) and recvmsg(2) calls can block in a variety of situations. Whether a call
blocks or returns with an error depends on the non-blocking setting of the file descriptor
and the MSG_DONTWAIT message flag. If the file descriptor is set to blocking mode (which
is the default), and the MSG_DONTWAIT flag is not given, the call will block.

In addition, the SO_SNDTIMEO and SO_RCVTIMEO socket options can be used to specify a
timeout (in seconds) after which the call will abort waiting, and return an error. The
default timeout is 0, which tells RDS to block indefinitely.

Message Transmission
Messages may be sent using sendmsg(2) once the RDS socket is bound. Message length cannot
exceed 4 gigabytes as the wire protocol uses an unsigned 32 bit integer to express the
message length.

RDS does not support out of band data. Applications are allowed to send to unicast
addresses only; broadcast or multicast are not supported.

A successful sendmsg(2) call puts the message in the socket's transmit queue where it will
remain until either the destination acknowledges that the message is no longer in the
network or the application removes the message from the send queue.

Messages can be removed from the send queue with the RDS_CANCEL_SENT_TO socket option
described below.

While a message is in the transmit queue its payload bytes are accounted for. If an
attempt is made to send a message while there is not sufficient room on the transmit
queue, the call will either block or return EAGAIN.

Trying to send to a destination that is marked congested (see above), the call will either
block or return ENOBUFS.

A message sent with no payload bytes will not consume any space in the destination's send
buffer but will result in a message receipt on the destination. The receiver will not get
any payload data but will be able to see the sender's address.

Messages sent to a port to which no socket is bound will be silently discarded by the
destination host. No error messages are reported to the sender.

Message Receipt
Messages may be received with recvmsg(2) on an RDS socket once it is bound to a source
address. RDS will return messages in-order, i.e. messages from the same sender will arrive
in the same order in which they were be sent.

The address of the sender will be returned in the sockaddr_in structure pointed to by the
msg_name field, if set.

If the MSG_PEEK flag is given, the first message on the receive is returned without
removing it from the queue.

The memory consumed by messages waiting for delivery does not limit the number of messages
that can be queued for receive. RDS does attempt to perform congestion control as
described in the section above.

If the length of the message exceeds the size of the buffer provided to recvmsg(2), then
the remainder of the bytes in the message are discarded and the MSG_TRUNC flag is set in
the msg_flags field. In this truncating case recvmsg(2) will still return the number of
bytes copied, not the length of entire messge. If MSG_TRUNC is set in the flags argument
to recvmsg(2), then it will return the number of bytes in the entire message. Thus one can
examine the size of the next message in the receive queue without incurring a copying
overhead by providing a zero length buffer and setting MSG_PEEK and MSG_TRUNC in the flags
argument.

The sending address of a zero-length message will still be provided in the msg_name field.

Control Messages
RDS uses control messages (a.k.a. ancillary data) through the msg_control and
msg_controllen fields in sendmsg(2) and recvmsg(2). Control messages generated by RDS
have a cmsg_level value of sol_rds. Most control messages are related to the zerocopy
interface added in RDS version 3, and are described in rds-rdma(7).

The only exception is the RDS_CMSG_CONG_UPDATE message, which is described in the
following section.

Polling
RDS supports the poll(2) interface in a limited fashion. POLLIN is returned when there is
a message (either a proper RDS message, or a control message) waiting in the socket's
receive queue. POLLOUT is always returned while there is room on the socket's send queue.

Sending to congested ports requires special handling. When an application tries to send to
a congested destination, the system call will return ENOBUFS. However, it cannot poll for
POLLOUT, as there is probably still room on the transmit queue, so the call to poll(2)
would return immediately, even though the destination is still congested.

There are two ways of dealing with this situation. The first is to simply poll for POLLIN.
By default, a process sleeping in poll(2) is always woken up when the congestion map is
updated, and thus the application can retry any previously congested sends.

The second option is explicit congestion monitoring, which gives the application more
fine-grained control.

With explicit monitoring, the application polls for POLLIN as before, and additionally
uses the RDS_CONG_MONITOR socket option to install a 64bit mask value in the socket, where
each bit corresponds to a group of ports. When a congestion update arrives, RDS checks the
set of ports that became uncongested against the bit mask installed in the socket. If they
overlap, a control messages is enqueued on the socket, and the application is woken up.
When it calls recvmsg(2), it will be given the control message containing the bitmap. on
the socket.

The congestion monitor bitmask can be set and queried using setsockopt(2) with
RDS_CONG_MONITOR, and a pointer to the 64bit mask variable.

Congestion updates are delivered to the application via RDS_CMSG_CONG_UPDATE control
messages. These control messages are always delivered by themselves (or possibly
additional control messages), but never along with a RDS data message. The cmsg_data field
of the control message is an 8 byte datum containing the 64bit mask value.

Applications can use the following macros to test for and set bits in the bitmask:

#define RDS_CONG_MONITOR_SIZE 64
#define RDS_CONG_MONITOR_BIT(port) (((unsigned int) port) % RDS_CONG_MONITOR_SIZE)
#define RDS_CONG_MONITOR_MASK(port) (1 << RDS_CONG_MONITOR_BIT(port))

Canceling Messages
An application can cancel (flush) messages from the send queue using the
RDS_CANCEL_SENT_TO socket option with setsockopt(2). This call takes an optional
sockaddr_in address structure as argument. If given, only messages to the destination
specified by this address are discarded. If no address is given, all pending messages are
discarded.

Note that this affects messages that have not yet been transmitted as well as messages
that have been transmitted, but for which no acknowledgment from the remote host has been
received yet.

Reliability
If sendmsg(2) succeeds, RDS guarantees that the message will be visible to recvmsg(2)
on a socket bound to the destination address as long as that destination socket remains
open.

If there is no socket bound on the destination, the message is silently dropped. If
the sending RDS can't be sure that there is no socket bound then it will try to send the
message indefinitely until it can be sure or the sent message is canceled.

If a socket is closed then all pending sent messages on the socket are canceled and may
or may not be seen by the receiver.

The RDS_CANCEL_SENT_TO socket option can be used to cancel all pending messages to a
given destination.

If a receiving socket is closed with pending messages then the sender considers those
messages as having left the network and will not retransmit them.

A message will only be seen by recvmsg(2) once, unless MSG_PEEK was specified. Once the
message has been delivered it is removed from the sending socket's transmit queue.

All messages sent from the same socket to the same destination will be delivered in the
order they're sent. Messages sent from different sockets, or to different destinations,
may be delivered in any order.

SYSCTL VALUES

These parameteres may only be accessed through their files in /proc/sys/net/rds. Access
through sysctl(2) is not supported.

pf_rds This file contains the string representation of the protocol family constant passed
to socket(2) to create a new RDS socket.

sol_rds
This file contains the string representation of the socket level parameter that is
passed to getsockopt(2) and setsockopt(2) to manipulate RDS socket options.

max_unacked_bytes and max_unacked_packets
These parameters are used to tune the generation of acknowledgements. By default,
the system receiving RDS messages does not send back explicit acknowledgements
unless it transmits a message of its own (in which case the ACK is piggybacked onto
the outgoing message), or when the sending system requests an ACK.

However, the sender needs to see an ACK from time to time so that it can purge old
messages from the send queue. The unacked bytes and packet counters are used to
keep track of how much data has been sent without requesting an ACK. The default is
to request an acknowledgement every 16 packets, or every 16 MB, whichever comes
first.

reconnect_delay_min_ms and reconnect_delay_max_ms
RDS uses host-to-host connections to transport RDS messages (both for the TCP and
the Infiniband transport). If this connection breaks, RDS will try to re-establish
the connection. Because this reconnect may be triggered by both hosts at the same
time and fail, RDS uses a random backoff before attempting a reconnect. These two
parameters specify the minimum and maximum delay in milliseconds. The default
values are 1 and 1000, respectively.

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

SYSCTL VALUES

SEE ALSO