Turbo NSS

Turbonss is a plugin for GNU Name Service Switch (NSS) functionality of GNU C Library (glibc). Turbonss implements lookup for user and passwd database entries (i.e. system users, groups, and group memberships). It's main goal is to run id(1) as fast as possible.

Turbonss is optimized for reading. If the data changes in any way, the whole file will need to be regenerated. Therefore, it was created, and best suited, for environments that have a central user & group database which then needs to be distributed to many servers/services, and the data does not change very often (e.g. hourly).

This is the fastest known NSS passwd/group implementation for reads. On a corpus with 10k users, 10k groups and 500 average members per group, id takes 17 seconds with the glibc default implementation, 10-17 milliseconds with a pre-cached nscd, ~8 milliseconds with turbonss.

Project status

The project is finished and is not recommended for production; just use nscd. Turbonss duly implements the full user/group API in src/libnss.zig: feel free to copy that. turbonss is only 2-5 times faster than nscd, which usually does not matter (including for my original use case).

Yours truly (the author) worked on this for about 7 months. And when this was finished it turned out that just slapping nscd on top of the existing NSS implementation is fast enough.

Dependencies

1. zig v0.10. turbonss uses stage1 (the C++ version) and is not compatible with stage2.
2. cmph: bundled with this repository.

Trying it out

Clone, compile and test first:

$ git clone --recursive https://git.sr.ht/~motiejus/turbonss
$ zig build test
$ zig build -Dtarget=x86_64-linux-gnu.2.31 -Dcpu=x86_64_v3 -Drelease-safe=true

One may choose different options, depending on requirements. Here are some hints:

1. -Dcpu=<...> for the CPU microarchitecture.
2. -Drelease-fast=true for max speed
3. -Drelease-small=true for smallest binary sizes.
4. -Dstrip=true to strip debug symbols.

Test it on a real system

db.turbo is the TurboNSS database file. To create one from /etc/group and /etc/passwd, use turbonss-unix2db:

$ zig-out/bin/turbonss-unix2db --passwd /etc/passwd --group /etc/group
$ zig-out/bin/turbonss-analyze db.turbo
File:               /etc/turbonss/db.turbo
Size:               2,624 bytes
Version:            0
Endian:             little
Pointer size:       8 bytes
getgr buffer size:  17
getpw buffer size:  74
Users:              19
Groups:             39
Shells:             1
Most memberships:   _apt (1)
Sections:
    Name                 Begin    End          Size bytes
    header               00000000 00000080            128
    bdz_gid              00000080 000000c0             64
    bdz_groupname        000000c0 00000100             64
    bdz_uid              00000100 00000140             64
    bdz_username         00000140 00000180             64
    idx_gid2group        00000180 00000240            192
    idx_groupname2group  00000240 00000300            192
    idx_uid2user         00000300 00000380            128
    idx_name2user        00000380 00000400            128
    shell_index          00000400 00000440             64
    shell_blob           00000440 00000480             64
    groups               00000480 00000700            640
    users                00000700 000009c0            704
    groupmembers         000009c0 00000a00             64
    additional_gids      00000a00 00000a40             64

Run and configure a test container that uses turbonss instead of the default files:

$ docker run -ti --rm -v `pwd`:/etc/turbonss -w /etc/turbonss debian:bullseye
# cp zig-out/lib/libnss_turbo.so.2 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/
# sed -i '/passwd\|group/ s/files/turbo/' /etc/nsswitch.conf

And run the commands:

$ getent passwd
$ getent group
$ id root

More users and groups

turbonss-makecorpus can synthesize more users and groups:

# ./zig-out/bin/turbonss-makecorpus 
wrote users=10000 groups=10000 avg-members=1000 to .
# cat group >> /etc/group
# cat passwd >> /etc/passwd
# time id u_1000000
<...>
real    0m17.380s
user    0m13.117s
sys     0m4.263s

17 seconds for an id command! Well, there are indeed many users and groups. Let's see how turbonss fares with it:

# zig-out/bin/turbonss-unix2db --group /etc/group --passwd /etc/passwd
total 10968512 bytes. groups=10019 users=10039
# ls -hs /etc/group /etc/passwd db.turbo
48M /etc/group  668K /etc/passwd   11M db.turbo
# sed -i '/passwd\|group/ s/files/turbo/' /etc/nsswitch.conf
# time id u_1000000
real    0m0.008s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.008s

That's ~1500x improvement for the id command (and notice about 4X compression ratio compared to plain files). If the number of users and groups is increased by 10x (to 100k each), the difference becomes even crazier:

# time id u_1000000
<...>
real    3m42.281s
user    2m30.482s
sys     0m55.840s
# sed -i '/passwd\|group/ s/files/turbo/' /etc/nsswitch.conf
# time id u_1000000
<...>
real    0m0.008s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.008s

Documentation

Architecture is detailed in docs/architecture.md Development notes are in docs/development.md