Fast Udp I/o for Firefox in Rust
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The article discusses Mozilla's efforts to improve UDP I/O performance in Firefox using Rust, achieving a 400% increase in throughput, and the discussion revolves around the technical details and implications of this improvement.
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Glad to know that networking still produces insanity trying to reproduce issues à la https://xkcd.com/2259/.
0x0000 is a special value for some NICs meaning please calculate for me.
One NIC years ago would set 0xFFFF for bad checksum. At first we thought this was horrifyingly broken. But really you can just fallback to software verification for the handful of legitimate and bad packets that arrive with that checksum.
UDP/QUIC can DoS any system not based on a cloud deployment large enough to soak up the peak traffic. It is silly, but it pushes out any hosting operation that can't reach a disproportionate bandwidth asymmetry with the client traffic. i.e. fine for FAANG, but a death knell for most other small/medium organizations.
This is why many LAN still drop most UDP traffic, and rate-limit the parts needed for normal traffic. Have a nice day =3
I was expecting to see io_uring mentioned somewhere in the linux section of the article.
1: https://github.com/axboe/liburing/discussions/1346
Do you mean zero-copy rx by ZCRX? If so, io_uring should support that, but you need a kernel recent enough.
It supports both zero-copy rx/tx on tcp and udp afaik, and there was a paper from the google engineers that implemented zero-copy send/recv (originally for tcp only) showing that the whole endeavor was worth it when the payload was >= 20kb in size (iirc).
It could be interesting to see if that's still the case with current state of linux, memory sticks, etc.
I've looked up the links from when i dug into that:
- https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/networking/msg_zeroco...
- the paper: https://netdevconf.org/2.1/papers/debruijn-msgzerocopy-talk....
- presentation about the paper: https://netdevconf.org/2.1/session.html?debruijn
> In extreme cases, on purely CPU bound benchmarks, we’re seeing a jump from < 1Gbit/s to 4 Gbit/s. Looking at CPU flamegraphs, the majority of CPU time is now spent in I/O system calls and cryptography code.
400% increase in throughput, which should translate to a proportionate reduction in CPU utilization for UDP network activity. That's pretty cool, especially for better power efficiency on portable clients (mobile and notebook).
I found this presentation refreshing. Too often, claims about transition to "modern" stacks are treated as being inherently good and do not come with the data to back it up.
https://github.com/snabbco/snabb/blob/master/src/apps/intel/...
They sugggest thinking of busybox
But if using busybox, their Makefile will fail
Using toybox instead will work
4 Gbit/s is on our rather dated benchmark machines. If you run the below command on a modern laptop, you likely reach higher throughput. (Consider disabling PMTUD to use a realistic Internet-like MTU. We do the same on our benchmark machines.)
https://github.com/mozilla/neqo
cargo bench --features bench --bench main -- "Download"
Pretty sure GSO/GRO aren't the only buggy parts either.
The reason that Firefox -- and other major browsers -- make self-signed certs so difficult to use is that allowing users to override certificate checks weakens the security of HTTPS, which otherwise relies on certificates being verifiable against the trust anchor list. It's true that this makes certain cases harder, but the judgement of the browser community was that that wasn't worth the security tradeoff. In other words, it's a policy decision, not a technical one.
IMHO they should gradually lock all dynamic code execution such as dynamic CSS and javascript behind a explicit toggle for insecure http sites.
> It massively undermines the security of connections to local devices
No, you see the prompt, it is insecure. If the network admin wants it secure, it means either a internal CA, or a literally free cert from let's encrypt. As the network admin did not care, it's insecure.
"but I have legacy garbage with hardcoded self-signed certs" then reverse proxy that legacy garbage with Caddy?
(An option to get some authentication, and one that I think chrome have kind of started to figure out, is to allow a PWA to connect to a local device and authenticate with its own keys. This still means you need to connect to the internet once with the client device, but at least from that point onwards it can work without internet. But then you need to have a whole other flow so that random sites can't just connect to your local devices...)
Security is still a lot better because the root is communicated out of band.
However, it's not an entirely trivial problem to get it right, especially because how how deeply the scheme is tied into the Web security model. Your example here is a good one of what I'm talking about:
> At the moment if you just use plain HTTP then things do mostly work (apart from some APIs which are somewhat arbitrarily locked to 'secure contexts' which means very little about the trustworthiness of the code that does or does not have access to those APIs),
You're right that being served over HTTPS doesn't make the site trustworthy, but what it does do is provide integrity for the identity of the server. So, for instance, the user might look at the URL and decide that the server is trustworthy and can be allowed to use the camera or microphone. However, if you use HTTPS but without verifying the certificate, then an attacker might in the future substitute themselves and take advantage of that camera and microphone access. Another example is when the user enters their password.
Rather than saying that browser vendors don't think this is worth solving in the abstract I would say that it's not very high on the priority list, especially because most of the ideas people have proposed don't work very well.
You can't just have some random router, printer, NAS, etc. generate its own cert out of thin air and tell the browser to ignore the fact that it can't be verified.
IMO this is a good thing. The way browsers handle HTTPS on older protocols is a result of the number of legacy badly configured systems there are out there which browser vendors don't want to break. Anywhere someone's supporting HTTP/3 they're doing something new, so enforcing a "do it right or don't do it at all" policy is possible.
HTTP/3 just removes the space for misunderstanding.
Just like self-signed certs worked for 20 years until the megacorps decided to break people's browsers because only their for-profit use cases matter. You might not remember, but random self signed certs worked for a long, long time. I use them. And their purpose is as a speed bump against massive passive surveillance, something that still works. TOFU works. ID isn't actually needed for most personal use cases on the web. That's a corporate thing. HTTP+HTTPS (self signed) is the perfect combo for human person use cases. And much more robust than HTTPS only which will break within a year or two left unwatched by human eyes.
The misunderstanding Chrome and it's followers (like firefox) removed was that they were for anything except corporate use cases.
As the author cited, kernel context switch is only on the order of 1 us (which seems too high for a system call anyways). You can reach 500 MB/s even if you still call sendmsg() on literally every packet as long as you average ~500 bytes/packet which is ~1/3 of the standard 1500 bytes MTU. So if you average MTU sized packets, you get 2 us of processing in addition to a full system call to reach 4 Gb/s.
The old number of 1 Gb/s could be reached with a average of ~125 bytes/packet, ~1/12 of the MTU or ~11 us of processing.
“But there are also memory copies in the network stack.” A trivial 3 instruction memory copy will go ~10-20 GB/s, 80–160 Gb/s. In 2 us you can drive 20-40 KB of copies. You are arguing the network stack does 40-80(!) copies to put a UDP packet, a thin veneer over a literal packet, into a packet. I have written commercial network drivers. Even without zero-copy, with direct access you can shovel UDP packets into the NIC buffers at basically memory copy speeds.
“But encryption is slow.” Not that slow. Here is some AES-128 GCM performance done what looks like over 5 years ago. [1] The Intel i5-6500, a midline processor from 8 years ago, averages 1729 MB/s. It can do the encryption for a 500 byte packet in 300 ns, 1/6 of the remaining 2 us budget. Modern processors seem to be closer to 3-5 GB/s per core, or about 25-40 Gb/s, 6-10x the stated UDP throughput.
[1] https://calomel.org/aesni_ssl_performance.html
“It is slow because it is being layered over QUIC.” Then why did you layer over a bottleneck that slows you down by 25x. Second of all, they did not used to do that and they still only got 1 Gb/s previously which is abysmal.
Third of all, you can achieve QUIC feature parity (minus encryption which will be your per-core bottleneck) at 50-100 Gb/s per core, so even that is just a function of using a slow protocol.
Finally, CPU class used in benchmarking is largely irrelevant because I am discussing 20x per-core performance bottlenecks. You would need to be benchmarking on a desktop CPU from 25 years ago to get that degree of single-core performance difference. We are talking iPhone 6, a decade old phone, territory for a efficient implementation to bottleneck on the processor at just 4 Gb/s.
But again, it is probably not a problem with their code. It is likely something else stupid happening on the network stack or protocol side of which they are merely a client.
spectre & meltdown.
> you get 2 us of processing in addition to a full system call to reach 4 Gb/s
TCP has route binding, UDP does not (connect(2) helps one side, but not both sides).
> “But encryption is slow.” Not that slow.
Encryption _is slow_ for small PDUs, at least the common constructions we're currently using. Everyone's essentially been optimizing for and benchmarking TCP with large frames.
If you hot loop the state as the micro-benchmarks do you can do better, but you still see a very visible cost of state setup that only starts to amortize decently well above 1024 byte payloads. Eradicate a bunch of cache efficiency by removing the tightness of the loop and this amortization boundary shifts quite far to the right, up into tens of kilobytes.
---
All of the above, plus the additional framing overheads come into play. Hell even the OOB data blocks are quite expensive to actually validate, it's not a good API to fix this problem, it's just the API we have shoved over bsd sockets.
And we haven't even gotten to buffer constraints and contention yet, but the default UDP buffer memory available on most systems is woefully inadequate for these use cases today. TCP buffers were scaled over time, but UDP buffers basically never were, they're still conservative values from the late 90s/00s really.
The API we really need for this kind of UDP setup is one where you can do something like fork the fd, connect(2) it with a full route bind, and then fix the RSS/XSS challenges that come from this splitting. After that we need a submission queue API rather than another bsd sockets ioctl style mess (uring, rio, etc). Sadly none of this is portable.
On the crypto side there are KDF approaches which can remove a lot of the state cost involved, it's not popular but some vendors are very taken with PSP for this reason - but PSP becoming more well known or used was largely suppressed by its various rejections in the ietf and in linux. Vendors doing scale tests with it have clear numbers though, under high concurrency you can scale this much better than the common tls or tls like constructions.
You are basically saying: “It is slow because of all these system/protocol decisions that mismatch what you need to get high performance out of the primitives.”
Which is my point. They are leaving, by my estimation, 10-20x performance on the floor due to external factors. They might be “fast given that they are bottlenecked by low performance systems”, which is good as their piece is not the bottleneck, but they are not objectively “fast” as the primitives can be configured to solve a substantially similar problem dramatically faster if integrated correctly.
sure, i mean i have no goal of alignment or misalignment, i'm just trying to provide more insights into what's going on based on my observations of this from having also worked on this udp path.
> Which is my point. They are leaving, by my estimation, 10-20x performance on the floor due to external factors. They might be “fast given that they are bottlenecked by low performance systems”, which is good as their piece is not the bottleneck, but they are not objectively “fast” as the primitives can be configured to solve a substantially similar problem dramatically faster if integrated correctly.
yes, though this basically means we're talking about throwing out chunks of the os, the crypto design, the protocol, and a whole lot of tuning at each layer.
the only vendor in a good position to do this is apple (being the only vendor that owns every involved layer in a single product chain), and they're failing to do so as well.
the alternative is a long old road, where folks make articles like this from time to time, we share our experiences and hope that someone is inspired enough reading it to be sniped into making incremental progress. it'd be truly fantastic if we sniped a group with the vigor and drive that the mptcp folks seem to have, as they've managed to do an unusually broad and deep push across a similar set of layered challenges (though still in progress).
I just measured. On my Ryzen 7 9700X, with Linux 6.12, it's about 50ns to call syscall(__NR_gettimeofday). Even post-spectre, entering the kernel isn't so expensive.
Using the libc wrapper will use the vdso. Using syscall() will enter the kernel.
I haven't measured, but calling the vdso should be closer to 5ns.
Someone else did more detailed measurements here:
https://arkanis.de/weblog/2017-01-05-measurements-of-system-...
Also: register renaming is a thing, as is write combining and pipelining. You're not flushing to L1 synchronously for every register, or ordinary userspace function calls would regularly take hundreds of cycles for handling saved registers. They don't.
It's easy to measure how long it takes to push and pop all registers, as well as writing a moderate number of entries to the stack. It's very cheap.
As far as switching into the kernel -- the syscall instruction is more or less just setting a few permission bits and acting as a speculation barrier; there's no reason for that to be expensive. I don't have information on the cost in isolation, but it's entirely unsurprising to me that the majority of the cost is in shuffling around registers. (The post-spectre TLB flush has a cost, but ASIDs mitigate the cost, and measuring the time spent entering and exiting the kernel wouldn't show it even if ASIDs weren't in use)
What do you say about the measurements from https://gms.tf/on-the-costs-of-syscalls.html? Table suggests that the cost is by a magnitude larger, depending on the CPU host, from 250 to 620ns.
Awesome, so you sponsored them right?
https://opencollective.com/quinn-rs
To be fair, we've gotten a great amount of code contributions from the Mozilla folks, so it's not like they haven't contributed anything.
(I am one of the Quinn maintainers.)
Source: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/b200-mozilla-fo...
Why bother sponsoring any open source projects when they can throw a few extra million into their CEO's salary, while that CEO is running their flagship product (Firefox) into the ground?
Still seeing this in Firefox with Cloudflare-hosted sites on both macOS and Fedora.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1979683#c3
https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/168913
Although the form result made it sound like a macOS-only issue, I actually have observed (and continue to observe) it on both macOS and Fedora.
EDIT: In the thread, am seeing the reference to how Firefox-on-QUIC works if one has IPv6. My ISP (Frontier FiOS) infamously doesn't support IPv6, so I'm out of luck there where Firefox is concerned.
> The combination of the two did cost me a couple of days, resulting in this (basically single line) change in quinn-udp.
2 hyper-links here probably were meant to be different, but got copy pasted the same link
It’s more like the kernel puts multiple datagrams into a single structure and passes that around between layers, maintaining the boundaries between them in that structure (sk_buff data fragments?)
Not an expert, but I tried looking at how this works and stumbled upon [0].
[0]: https://lwn.net/Articles/768995/
QUIC does not depend on UDP datagrams to be delivered in order. Re-ordering happens on the QUIC layer. Thus, when receiving, the kernel passes a batch (i.e. segmented super datagram) of potentially out-of-order datagrams to the QUIC layer. QUIC reorders them.
Maybe https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerating-udp-packet-transmis... brings some clarity.
For example GSO might split a 3.5KB data buffer into 4 UDP datagrams: U1, U2, U3, and U4, with U1/U2/U3 being 1KB and U4 being 512B. When U1~4 arrives on the receiving host, how does GRO deal with the different permutations of orderingof the four packets (assuming no loss) and pass them to the QUIC layer? Like if U1/U2/U3/U4 come in the original sending order GRO can batch nicely. But what if they come in the order U1/U4/U3/U2? How does GRO deal with the fact that U4 is shorter?
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