ECN and ToS of UDP Packet in SwiftNIO

Related Projects SwiftNIO
1

Hey,

Is it possible to read the Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) flag of a UDP/IP Packet?
Also, is it possible to set the Type of Service (ToS) or Service Class of a UDP/IP Packet?

I know these flags are accessible through Network.framework but I don't know if there exits an eqivalent API for traditional sockets.
It looks like the WIP implementation of UDP support in swift-nio-transport-services does currently not include support for these flags.

Thanks
David

2

Currently those flags are not exposed anywhere. In principle we can extend AddressedEnvelope to have a place to store metadata that is of interest to users. Users would have to request that we persist that information on messages because doing so presents a cost, but that's not unreasonable.

To begin with, we can design this out for swift-nio-transport-services, where we know this information is available. I can dive quickly into whether this information is exposed on raw sockets, but it is quite possible that it is not.

3

Yup, we can do this on sockets as well if we want. The socket options (IPPROTO_IP, IP_RECVTOS) and (IPPROTO_IP6, IPPROTO_RECVTCLASS) would do the trick.

What this needs:

  1. An enhancement to AddressedEnvelope to store arbitrary metadata. This likely ends up being a mapping of some kind.
  2. A change to move the current usage of recvfrom onto recvmsg so that we can extract control message data. I have most of this already.
  3. A change to provide support for extracting control message data into appropriately shaped boxes on the metadata of AddressedEnvelope. This shouldn't be too hard, though it requires some C helpers to enable iteration over the control message data.
4

See Support propagating ECN information on `AddressedEnvelope`s · Issue #1472 · apple/swift-nio · GitHub

5

Nice, that would cover the receiver side.

What about sending a packet with a ToS/Service Class?
I think if we use AddressedEnvelope here too, we could run into problems in the swift-nio-transport-services implementation because of the included remoteAddress .
As far as I can tell, NWConnection can only send packets to one fixed address and not dynamically on every send as traditional sockets.

6

As AddressedEnvelope is used in both inbound and outbound directions the pipeline side of that is covered.

I don't think it's an issue: we can arrange it so you can still choose to send an AddressedEnvelope instead of a ByteBuffer, and we'd just validate that you're using the right address for the remote peer. That will let you attach the appropriate metadata.