flow: Avoid moving flow entries to compact table

Currently we always keep the flow table maximally compact: that is all the
active entries are contiguous at the start of the table.  Doing this
sometimes requires moving an entry when one is freed.  That's kind of
fiddly, and potentially expensive: it requires updating the hash table for
the new location, and depending on flow type, it may require EPOLL_CTL_MOD,
system calls to update epoll tags with the new location too.

Implement a new way of managing the flow table that doesn't ever move
entries.  It attempts to maintain some compactness by always using the
first free slot for a new connection, and mitigates the effect of non
compactness by cheaply skipping over contiguous blocks of free entries.
See the "theory of operation" comment in flow.c for details.

Signed-off-by: David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au>b
[sbrivio: additional ASSERT(flow_first_free <= FLOW_MAX - 2) to avoid
 Coverity Scan false positive]
Signed-off-by: Stefano Brivio <sbrivio@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/passt.c b/passt.c
index 71bea8f..d315438 100644
--- a/passt.c
+++ b/passt.c
@@ -285,6 +285,8 @@ int main(int argc, char **argv)
 
 	clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, &now);
 
+	flow_init();
+
 	if ((!c.no_udp && udp_init(&c)) || (!c.no_tcp && tcp_init(&c)))
 		exit(EXIT_FAILURE);