[ovs-discuss] [OVN] running bfd on ecmp routes?

Han Zhou zhouhan at gmail.com
Tue Jun 16 19:20:10 UTC 2020


On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 11:32 AM Tim Rozet <trozet at redhat.com> wrote:

> Thanks Han. See inline.
> Tim Rozet
> Red Hat CTO Networking Team
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 1:45 PM Han Zhou <zhouhan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 7:22 AM Tim Rozet <trozet at redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi All,
>>> While looking into using ecmp routes for an OVN router I noticed there
>>> is no support for BFD on these routes. Would it be possible to add this
>>> capability? I would like the next hop to be removed from the openflow group
>>> if BFD detection for that next hop goes down. My routes in this case would
>>> be on a GR for N/S external next hop and not going across a tunnel as it
>>> egresses.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Tim Rozet
>>> Red Hat CTO Networking Team
>>>
>>> Hi Tim,
>>
>> Thanks for bringing this up. Yes, it is desirable to have BFD support for
>> OVN routers. Here are my thoughts.
>>
>> In general, OVN routers are distributed. It is not easy to tell which
>> node should be responsible for the BFD session, especially, to handle the
>> response packets. Even if we managed to implement this, the node detects
>> the failure needs to populate the information to central SB DB, so that the
>> information is distributed to all nodes, to make the distributed route
>> updated.
>>
>
> Right in a distributed case it would mean the BFD endpoint would be under
> the network managed by OVN, and therefore reside on the same node where the
> port for that endpoint resides. In the ovn-kubernetes context, it is a pod
> running on a node connected to the DR.
>

Yes, this may be the typical case. However, there can be more scenarios,
since there is no limit for what the nexthop can be in OVN routes. It can
be an IP of a OVN port which is straightforward. It can also be an IP of a
nested workload which is under the OVN managed network but not directly
known by OVN (maybe learned through ARP). The nexthop can also be on
external networks reachable through distributed gateway ports (instead of
GR), in which case the routes are distributed and it requires resolving the
output port to figure out that the BFD session should be running through
the gateway node. But I agree that all these should be doable, although it
may introduce some complexity. In addition, for distributed routers, BFD is
not necessarily faster than an external monitoring mechanism, because the
updates to the route would anyway need to go through the central DB (so
that it can be enforced on all nodes in the distributed manner).


>> In your particular case, it may be easier, since the gateway router is
>> physically located on a single node. ovn-controller on the GR node can
>> maintain BFD session with the nexthops. If a session is down,
>> ovn-controller may take action locally to enforce the change locally.
>>
>
> Yeah for the external network case this makes sense. I went ahead and
> filed a BZ:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1847570
>
>>
>> For both cases, more details may need to be sorted out.
>>
>> Alternatively, it shouldn't be hard to have an external monitoring
>> service/agent that talks BFD with the nexthops, and react on the session
>> status changes by updating ECMP routes in OVN NB.
>>
> Yeah I have a workaround plan to do this for now, using a networking
> health check and signaling from K8S. The problem is this is much slower
> than using real BFD, but it is better than nothing.
>

Great. Is there any design doc or POC? (or if there is a plan to share when
ready). Thanks!

>
>
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Han
>>
>
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