From 10a11861943902fda74f37f456b45183b2bca270 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jianbo Liu Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2025 04:35:42 +0300 Subject: [PATCH] xfrm: Refactor xfrm_input lock to reduce contention with RSS With newer NICs like mlx5 supporting RSS for IPsec crypto offload, packets for a single Security Association (SA) are scattered across multiple CPU cores for parallel processing. The xfrm_state spinlock (x->lock) is held for each packet during xfrm processing. When multiple connections or flows share the same SA, this parallelism causes high lock contention on x->lock, creating a performance bottleneck and limiting scalability. The original xfrm_input() function exacerbated this issue by releasing and immediately re-acquiring x->lock. For hardware crypto offload paths, this unlock/relock sequence is unnecessary and introduces significant overhead. This patch refactors the function to relocate the type_offload->input_tail call for the offload path, performing all necessary work while continuously holding the lock. This reordering is safe, since packets which don't pass the checks below will still fail them with the new code. Performance testing with iperf using multiple parallel streams over a single IPsec SA shows significant improvement in throughput as the number of queues (and thus CPU cores) increases: +-----------+---------------+--------------+-----------------+ | RX queues | Before (Gbps) | After (Gbps) | Improvement (%) | +-----------+---------------+--------------+-----------------+ | 2 | 32.3 | 34.4 | 6.5 | | 4 | 34.4 | 40.0 | 16.3 | | 6 | 24.5 | 38.3 | 56.3 | | 8 | 23.1 | 38.3 | 65.8 | | 12 | 18.1 | 29.9 | 65.2 | | 16 | 16.0 | 25.2 | 57.5 | +-----------+---------------+--------------+-----------------+ Signed-off-by: Jianbo Liu Reviewed-by: Cosmin Ratiu Signed-off-by: Steffen Klassert --- net/xfrm/xfrm_input.c | 14 +++++++------- 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-) diff --git a/net/xfrm/xfrm_input.c b/net/xfrm/xfrm_input.c index c9ddef869aa55..257935cbd2211 100644 --- a/net/xfrm/xfrm_input.c +++ b/net/xfrm/xfrm_input.c @@ -505,6 +505,7 @@ int xfrm_input(struct sk_buff *skb, int nexthdr, __be32 spi, int encap_type) async = 1; dev_put(skb->dev); seq = XFRM_SKB_CB(skb)->seq.input.low; + spin_lock(&x->lock); goto resume; } /* GRO call */ @@ -541,6 +542,8 @@ int xfrm_input(struct sk_buff *skb, int nexthdr, __be32 spi, int encap_type) XFRM_INC_STATS(net, LINUX_MIB_XFRMINHDRERROR); goto drop; } + + nexthdr = x->type_offload->input_tail(x, skb); } goto lock; @@ -638,11 +641,9 @@ lock: goto drop_unlock; } - spin_unlock(&x->lock); - if (xfrm_tunnel_check(skb, x, family)) { XFRM_INC_STATS(net, LINUX_MIB_XFRMINSTATEMODEERROR); - goto drop; + goto drop_unlock; } seq_hi = htonl(xfrm_replay_seqhi(x, seq)); @@ -650,9 +651,8 @@ lock: XFRM_SKB_CB(skb)->seq.input.low = seq; XFRM_SKB_CB(skb)->seq.input.hi = seq_hi; - if (crypto_done) { - nexthdr = x->type_offload->input_tail(x, skb); - } else { + if (!crypto_done) { + spin_unlock(&x->lock); dev_hold(skb->dev); nexthdr = x->type->input(x, skb); @@ -660,9 +660,9 @@ lock: return 0; dev_put(skb->dev); + spin_lock(&x->lock); } resume: - spin_lock(&x->lock); if (nexthdr < 0) { if (nexthdr == -EBADMSG) { xfrm_audit_state_icvfail(x, skb, -- 2.47.3