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microVM Metadata Service

MMDS consists of three major logical components: the backend, the data store, and the minimalist HTTP/TCP/IPv4 stack (named Dumbo). They all exist within the Firecracker process, and outside the KVM boundary; the first is a part of the API server, the data store is a global entity for a single microVM, and the last is a part of the device model.

The MMDS backend

Users can add/update the MMDS contents via the backend, which is accessible through the Firecracker API. Setting the initial contents involves a PUT request to the /mmds API resource, with a JSON body that describes the desired data store structure and contents. Here's a JSON example:

{
"latest": {
            "meta-data": {
                "ami-id": "ami-12345678",
                "reservation-id": "r-fea54097",
                "local-hostname": "ip-10-251-50-12.ec2.internal",
                "public-hostname": "ec2-203-0-113-25.compute-1.amazonaws.com",
                "network": {
                    "interfaces": {
                        "macs": {
                            "02:29:96:8f:6a:2d": {
                                "device-number": "13345342",
                                "local-hostname": "localhost",
                                "subnet-id": "subnet-be9b61d"
                            }
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }
}

The MMDS contents can be updated either via a subsequent PUT (that replaces them entirely), or using PATCH requests, which feed the JSON body into the JSON Merge Patch functionality, based on RFC 7396. MMDS related API requests come from the host, which is considered a trusted environment, so there are no checks beside the kind of validation done by HTTP server and serde-json (the crate used to de/serialize JSON). The size limit for the stored metadata is configurable and defaults to 51200 bytes. When increasing this limit, one must take into consideration that storing and retrieving large amount of data may induce bottlenecks for the HTTP REST API processing, which is based on micro-http crate. MMDS contents can be retrieved using the Firecracker API, via a GET request to the /mmds resource.

The data store

This is a global data structure, currently referenced using a global variable, that represents the strongly-typed version of JSON-based user input describing the MMDS contents. It leverages the recursive Value type exposed by serde-json. It can only be accessed from thread-safe contexts. MMDS data store supports at the moment storing and retrieving JSON values. Data store contents can be retrieved using the Firecracker API server from host and using the embedded MMDS HTTP/TCP/IPv4 network stack from guest. MMDS data store is upper bounded to the value of the --mmds-size-limit command line parameter. If left unconfigured, it will default to the value of --http-api-max-payload-size, which is 51200 bytes by default.

Dumbo

The Dumbo HTTP/TCP/IPv4 network stack handles guest HTTP requests heading towards the configured MMDS IPv4 address. Before going into Dumbo specifics, it's worth going through a brief description of the Firecracker network device model. Firecracker only offers Virtio-net paravirtualized devices to guests. Drivers running in the guest OS use ring buffers in a shared memory area to communicate with the device model when sending or receiving frames. The device model associates each guest network device with a TAP device on the host. Frames sent by the guest are written to the TAP fd, and frames read from the TAP fd are handed over to the guest.

The Dumbo stack can be instantiated once for every network device, and is disabled by default. It can be enabled through the API request body used to configure MMDS by specifying the ID of the network interface inside the network_interfaces list. In order for the API call to succeed, the network device must be attached beforehand, otherwise an error is returned. Once enabled, the stack taps into the aforementioned data path. Each frame coming from the guest is examined to determine whether it should be processed by Dumbo instead of being written to the TAP fd. Also, every time there is room in the ring buffer to hand over frames to the guest, the device model first checks whether Dumbo has anything to send; if not, it resumes getting frames from the TAP fd (when available).

We chose to implement our own solution, instead of leveraging existing libraries/implementations, because responding to guest MMDS queries in the context of Firecracker is amenable to a wide swath of simplifications. First of all, we only need to handle GET and PUT requests, which require a bare-bones HTTP 1.1 server, without support for most headers and more advanced features like chunking. Also, we get to choose what subset of HTTP is used when building responses. Moving lower in the stack, we are dealing with TCP connections over what is essentially a point-to-point link, that seldom loses packets and does not reorder them. This means we can do away with congestion control (we only use flow control), complex reception logic, and support for most TCP options/features. At this point, the layers below (Ethernet and IPv4) don't involve much more than sanity checks of frame/packet contents.

Dumbo is built using both general purpose components (which we plan to offer as part of one or more libraries), and Firecracker MMDS specific code. The former category consists of various helper modules used to process streams of bytes as protocol data units (Ethernet & ARP frames, IPv4 packets, and TCP segments), a TCP handler which listens for connections while demultiplexing incoming segments, a minimalist TCP connection endpoint implementation, and a greatly simplified HTTP 1.1 server. The Firecracker MMDS specific code is found in the logic which taps into the device model, and the component that parses an HTTP request, builds a response based on MMDS contents, and finally sends back a reply.

MMDS Network Stack

Somewhat confusingly, this is the name of the component which taps the device model. It has a user-configured IPv4 address (see Firecracker MMDS configuration API) and MAC (06:01:23:45:67:01) addresses. The latter is also used to respond to ARP requests. For every frame coming from the guest, the following steps take place:

  1. Apply a heuristic to determine whether the frame may contain an ARP request for the MMDS IP address, or an IPv4 packet heading towards the same address. There can be no false negatives. Frames that fail both checks are rejected (deferred to the device model for regular processing).
  2. Reject invalid Ethernet frames. Reject valid frames if their EtherType is neither ARP, nor IPv4.
  3. (if EtherType == ARP) Reject invalid ARP frames. Reject the frame if its target protocol address field is different from the MMDS IP address. Otherwise, record that an ARP request has been received (the stack only remembers the most recent request).
  4. (if EtherType == IPv4) Reject invalid packets. Reject packets if their destination address differs from the MMDS IP address. Drop (stop processing without deferring to the device model) packets that do not carry TCP segments (by looking at the protocol number field). Send the rest to the inner TCP handler.

The current implementation does not support Ethernet 802.1Q tags, and does not handle IP fragmentation. Tagged Ethernet frames are most likely going to be deferred to the device model for processing, because the heuristics do not take the presence of the tag into account. Moreover, their EtherType will not appear to be of interest. Fragmented IP packets do not get reassembled; they are treated as independent packets.

Whenever the guest is able to receive a frame, the device model first requests one from the MMDS network stack associated with the current network device.

  1. If an ARP request has been previously recorded, send an ARP reply and forget about the request.
  2. If the inner TCP handler has any packets to transmit, wrap the next one into a frame and send it.
  3. There are no MMDS related frames to send, so tell the device model to read from the TAP fd instead.

TCP handler

Handles received packets that appear to carry TCP segments. Its operation is described in the dumbo crate documentation. Each connection is associated with an MMDS endpoint.

MMDS endpoint

This component gets the byte stream from an inner TCP connection object, identifies the boundaries of the next HTTP request, and parses it using an HttpRequest object. For each valid GET request, the URI is used to identify a key from the metadata store (like in the previous example), and a response is built using the Firecracker implementation of HttpResponse logic, based on the associated value, and sent back to the guest over the same connection. Each endpoint has a fixed size receive buffer, and a variable length response buffer (depending on the size of each response). TCP receive window semantics are used to ensure the guest does not overrun the receive buffer during normal operation (the connection has to drop segments otherwise). There can be at most one response pending at any given time.

Here are more details describing what happens when a segment is received by an MMDS endpoint (previously created when a SYN segment arrived at the TCP handler):

  1. Invoke the receive functionality of the inner connection object, and append any new data to the receive buffer.
  2. If no response is currently pending, attempt to identify the end of the first request in the receive buffer. If no such boundary can be found, and the buffer is full, reset the inner connection (which also causes the endpoint itself to be subsequently removed) because the guest exceeded the maximum allowed request size.
  3. If no response is pending, and we can identify a request in the receive buffer, parse it, free up the associated buffer space (also update the connection receive window), and build an HTTP response, which becomes the current pending response.
  4. If a FIN segment was received, and there's no pending response, call close on the inner connection. If a valid RST is received at any time, mark the endpoint for removal.

When the TCP handler asks an MMDS endpoint for any segments to send, the transmission logic of the inner connection is invoked, specifying the pending response (when present) as the payload source. All packets coming from MMDS have the TTL value set to 1 by default.

Connection

Connection objects are minimalist implementation of the TCP protocol. They are used to reassemble the byte stream which carries guest HTTP requests, and to send back segments which contain parts of the response. More details are available in the dumbo crate documentation.