[tcpm] Flow Label Load Balancing

[Alexander Azimov <[e-mail]>]

Dear colleagues,

I have added in the cc both v6op and tcpm for a reason and let me explain
why.

It's clear that we are moving forward with load balancing that uses flow
label (FL). And the pressure will increase with SRv6 adoption. But at the
moment wide adoption of FL-based load-balancing may create significant
issues for TCP Anycast services.

RFC6437 suggests putting hash from 5-tuple into FL value. And as far as I
know, there is no document that updates this behavior. This description is
perfectly fine, but what is implemented in the Linux kernel is different:
FL is carrying hash from 5-tuple with an additional seed, and this seed is
randomly changed after each RTO/SYN_RTO event. Here are related patches:

   -
   https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/[e-mail]/
   -
   https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/[e-mail]/
   - https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/[e-mail]/


This is a great thing by the way because in the data center environment with
multiple equal paths it gives a way to have pseudo-multipath TCP which
jumps between paths in case of an outage. There might be interest to write
down an informational document for this.

But the problem happens when TCP flows start jumping between anycast
points. If anycast service provides connection tracking (L7/TCP proxy,
stateful L4 balancer) the 'jump' may redirect traffic to another point, and
with the adoption of FL load balancing by the transit providers - to
another location, where no TCP state is available. In other words, an
established TCP session breaks after RTO event. And it's not just a theory
- we already faced this kind of issue in our network, and it is really hard
to debug.

I wonder what you think is a proper solution:

   - Making FL related RTO change as knob instead of default behavior;
   - Adding negotiation behavior in TCP;
   - Something else?

I'm looking forward to your advice. If there is a document that describes
the above problem - please give me a reference.

-- 
Best regards,
Alexander Azimov