When we run on live traffic, time handling is simple. Packets have a
timestamp set by the capture method. Management threads can simply
use 'gettimeofday' to know the current time. There should never be
any serious gap between the two or major differnces between the
threads.
In offline mode, things are dramatically different. Here we try to keep
the time from the pcap, which means that if the packets are recorded in
2011 the log output should also reflect this. Multiple issues:
1. merged pcaps might have huge time jumps or time going backward
2. slowly recorded pcaps may be processed much faster than their
'realtime'
3. management threads need a concept of what the 'current' time is for
enforcing timeouts
4. due to (1) individual threads may have very different views on what
the current time is. E.g. T1 processed packet 1 with TS X, while T2
at the very same time processes packet 2 with TS X+100000s.
The changes in flow handling make the problems worse. The capture thread
no longer handles the flow lookup, while it did set the global 'time'.
This meant that a thread may be working on Packet 1 with TS 1, while the
capture thread already saw packet 2 with TS 10000. Management threads
would take TS 10000 as the 'current time', considering a flow created by
the first thread as timed out immediately.
This was less of a problem before the flow changes as the capture thread
would also create a flow reference for a packet, meaning the flow
couldn't time out as easily. Packets in the queues between capture
thread and workers would all hold such references.
The patch updates the time handling to be as follows.
In offline mode we keep the timestamp per thread. If a management thread
needs current time, it will get the minimum of the threads' values. This
is to avoid the problem that T2s time value might already trigger a flow
timeout as the flow lastts + 100000s is almost certainly meaning the
flow would be considered timed out.
projects / thirdparty / suricata.git / commit
