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README.md
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
performance, with focus on making id(1)
run as fast as possible.
Turbonss is optimized for reading. If the data changes in any way, the whole file will need to be regenerated (and tooling only supports only full generation). 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).
To understand more about name service switch, start with
nsswitch.conf(5)
.
Design & constraints
To be fast, the user/group database (later: DB) has to be small (background). It encodes user & group information in a way that minimizes the DB size, and reduces jumping across the DB ("chasing pointers and thrashing CPU cache").
To understand how this is done efficiently, let's analyze the
getpwnam_r(3)
in high level. This API call accepts a username
and returns the following user information:
struct passwd {
char *pw_name; /* username */
char *pw_passwd; /* user password */
uid_t pw_uid; /* user ID */
gid_t pw_gid; /* group ID */
char *pw_gecos; /* user information */
char *pw_dir; /* home directory */
char *pw_shell; /* shell program */
};
Turbonss, among others, implements this call, and takes the following steps to
resolve a username to a struct passwd*
:
- Open the DB (using
mmap
) and interpret it's first 64 bytes as a*struct Header
. The header stores offsets to the sections of the file. This needs to be done once, when the NSS library is loaded. - Hash the username using a perfect hash function. Perfect hash function
returns a number
n ∈ [0,N-1]
, where N is the total number of users. - Jump to the
n
'th location in theidx_name2user
section, which contains the indexi
to the user's information. - Jump to the location
i
of sectionUsers
, which stores the full user information. - Decode the user information (which is all in a continuous memory block) and return it to the caller.
In total, that's one hash for the username (~150ns), two pointer jumps within
the group file (to sections idx_name2user
and Users
), and, now that the
user record is found, memcpy
for each field.
The turbonss DB file is be mmap
-ed, making it simple to jump across the file
using pointer arithmetic. This also reduces memory usage, as the mmap'ed
regions are shared. Turbonss reads do not consume any heap space.
Tight packing places some constraints on the underlying data:
- Maximum database size: 4GB.
- Permitted length of username and groupname: 1-32 bytes.
- Permitted length of shell and home: 1-64 bytes.
- Permitted comment ("gecos") length: 0-255 bytes.
- User name, groupname, gecos and shell must be utf8-encoded.
Sorting is stable. In v0:
- Groups are sorted by gid, ascending.
- Users are sorted by their name, ascending by the unicode codepoints (locale-independent).
Checking out and building
$ git clone --recursive https://git.sr.ht/~motiejus/turbonss
Alternatively, if you forgot --recursive
:
$ git submodule update --init
And run tests:
$ zig build test
Other commands will be documented as they are implemented.
This project uses git subtrac for managing dependencies. They work just like regular submodules, except all the refs of the submodules are in this repository. Repeat after me: all the submodules are in this repository. So if you have a copy of this repo, dependencies will not disappear.
remarks on id(1)
A known implementation runs id(1) at ~250 rps sequentially on ~20k users and ~10k groups. Our rps target is much higher.
To better reason about the trade-offs, it is useful to understand how id(1)
is implemented, in rough terms:
- lookup user by name (
getpwent_r(3)
). - get all gids for the user (
getgrouplist(3)
). Note: it is actually usinginitgroups_dyn
, accepts a uid, and is very poorly documented. - for each additional gid, get the
struct group*
([getgrgid_r(3)
][getgrgid_r]).
Assuming a member is in ~100 groups on average, to reach 10k id/s translates to 1M group lookups per second. We need to convert gid to a group index, and group index to a group gid/name quickly.
Caveat: struct group
contains an array of pointers to names of group members
(char **gr_mem
). However, id
does not use that information, resulting in
read amplification, sometimes by 10-100x. Therefore, if argv[0] == "id"
, our
implementation of [getgrid_r(3)
][getgrid] returns the struct group*
without
the members. This speeds up id
by about 10x on a known NSS implementation.
Relatedly, because [getgrid_r(3)
][getgrid] does not need the group members,
the group members are stored in a different DB section, reducing the Groups
section and making more of it fit the CPU caches.
Turbonss header
The turbonss header looks like this:
OFFSET TYPE NAME DESCRIPTION
0 [4]u8 magic always 0xf09fa4b7
4 u8 version now `0`
5 u16 bom 0x1234
u8 num_shells max value: 63.
8 u32 num_users number of passwd entries
12 u32 num_groups number of group entries
16 u32 offset_bdz_uid2user
24 u32 offset_bdz_name2user
20 u32 offset_bdz_groupname2group
28 u32 offset_idx offset to the first idx_ section
32 u32 offset_groups
36 u32 offset_users
40 u32 offset_groupmembers
44 u32 offset_additional_gids
magic
is 0xf09fa4b7, and version
must be 0
. All integers are
native-endian. bom
is a byte-order-mark. It must resolve to 0x1234
(4460).
If that's not true, the file is consumed in a different endianness than it was
created at. Turbonss files cannot be moved across different-endianness
computers. If that happens, turbonss will refuse to read the file.
Offsets are indices to further sections of the file, with zero being the first
block (pointing to the magic
field). As all sections are aligned to 64 bytes,
the offsets are always pointing to the beginning of an 64-byte "block".
Therefore, all offset_*
values could be u26
. As u32
is easier to
visualize with xxd, and the header block fits to 64 bytes anyway, we are
keeping them as u32 now.
Sections whose lengths can be calculated do not have a corresponding offset_*
header field. For example, bdz_gid2group
comes immediately after the header,
and idx_groupname2group
comes after idx_gid2group
, whose offset is
offset_idx
, and size can be calculated.
num_shells
would fit to u6; however, we would need 2 bits of padding (all
other fields are byte-aligned). If we instead do u2
followed by u6
, the
byte would look very unusual on a little-endian architecture. Therefore we will
just reject the DB if the number of shells exceeds 63.
Primitive types
User
and Group
entries are sorted by the order they were received in the input
file. All entries are aligned to 8 bytes. All User
and Group
entries are
referred by their byte offset in the Users
and Groups
section relative to
the beginning of the section.
const PackedGroup = packed struct {
gid: u32,
groupname_len: u8, // max is 32, but have too much space here.
// varint members_offset + (groupname_len-1)-length string
groupdata []u8;
}
pub const PackedUser = packed struct {
uid: u32,
gid: u32,
padding: u2 = 0,
shell_len_or_idx: u6,
shell_here: bool,
name_is_a_suffix: bool,
home_len: u6,
name_len: u5,
gecos_len: u11,
// pseudocode: variable-sized array that will be stored immediately after
// this struct.
userdata []u8;
}
userdata
contains a few entries:
- home.
- name (optional).
- gecos.
- shell (optional).
additional_gids_offset
: varint.
First byte of home is stored right after the gecos_len
field, and it's
length is home_len
. The same logic applies to all the stringdata
fields:
there is a way to calculate their relative position from the length of the
fields before them.
Additionally, there are two "easy" optimizations:
- shells are often shared across different users, see the "Shells" section.
name
is frequently a suffix ofhome
. For example,/home/motiejus
andmotiejus
. In this case storing both name and home is wasteful. Therefore name has two options:name_is_a_suffix=true
: name is a suffix of the home dir. Thenname
starts at thehome_len - name_len
'th byte ofhome
, and ends at the same place ashome
.name_is_a_suffix=false
: name begins one byte after home, and it's length isname_len
.
The last field, additional_gids_offset
, which is needed least frequently,
is stored at the end.
Shells
Normally there is a limited number of separate shells even in huge user
databases. A few examples: /bin/bash
, /usr/bin/nologin
, /bin/zsh
among
others. Therefore, "shells" have an optimization: they can be pointed by in the
external list, or, if they are unique to the user, reside among the user's
data.
63 most popular shells (i.e. referred to by at least two User entries) are stored externally in "Shells" area. The less popular ones are stored with userdata.
Shells section consists of two sub-sections: the index and the blob. The index is a list of structs which point to a location in the "blob" area:
const ShellIndex = struct {
offset: u10,
len: u6,
};
In the user's struct shell_here=true
signifies that the shell is stored with
userdata, and it's length is shell_len_or_idx
. shell_here=false
means it is
stored in the Shells
section, and it's index is shell_len_or_idx
.
Variable-length integers (varints)
Varint is an efficiently encoded integer (packed for small values). Same as
protocol buffer varints, except the largest possible value is u64
.
They compress integers well. Varints are stored for group memberships.
Group memberships
There are two group memberships at play:
- Given a group (gid/name), resolve the members' names (e.g.
getgrgid
). - Given a username, resolve user's group gids (for
initgroups(3)
).
When group's memberships are resolved in (1), the same call also requires other
group information: gid and group name. Therefore it makes sense to store a
pointer to the group members in the group information itself. However, the
memberships are not always necessary (see remarks about id(1)
), therefore
the memberships will be stored separately, outside of the groups section.
Similarly, when user's groups are resolved in (2), they are not always necessary
(i.e. not part of struct user*
), therefore the memberships themselves are
stored out of bound.
Groupmembers
and UserGids
store group and user memberships
respectively. Membership IDs are used in their entirety — not necessitating
random access, thus suitable for tight packing and varint encoding.
- For each group — a list of pointers (offsets) to User records, because
getgr*_r
returns pointers to membernames. - For each user — a list of gids, because
initgroups_dyn
(and friends) returns an array of gids.
An entry of Groupmembers
and UserGids
looks like this piece of
pseudo-code:
const PackedList = struct {
Length: varint,
Members: [Length]varint,
}
const Groupmembers = PackedList;
const UserGids = PackedList;
Indices
Now that we've sketched the implementation of id(3)
, it's clearer to
understand which operations need to be fast; in order of importance:
- lookup gid -> group info (this is on hot path in id) without members.
- lookup username -> user's groups.
- lookup uid -> user.
- lookup groupname -> group.
- lookup username -> user.
These indices can use perfect hashing like bdz from cmph: a perfect
hash hashes a list of bytes to a sequential list of integers. Perfect hashing
algorithms require some space, and take some time to calculate ("hashing
duration"). I've tested BDZ, which hashes [][]u8
to a sequential list of
integers (not preserving order) and CHM, preserves order. BDZ accepts an
optional argument 3 <= b <= 10
.
- BDZ algorithm requires (b=3, 900KB, b=7, 338KB, b=10, 306KB) for 1M values.
- Latency to resolve 1M keys: (170ms, 180ms, 230ms, respectively).
- Packed vs non-packed latency differences are not meaningful.
CHM retains order, however, 1M keys weigh 8MB. 10k keys are ~20x larger with CHM than with BDZ, eliminating the benefit of preserved ordering: we can just have a separate index.
None of the tested perfect hashing algorithms makes the distinction between
existing (in the initial dictionary) and new keys. In other words, HASH(value)
will be pointing to a number n ∈ [0,N-1]
, regardless whether the value was in
the initial dictionary. Therefore one must always confirm, after calculating
the hash, that the key matches what's been hashed.
idx_*
sections are of type []PackedIntArray(u29)
and are pointing to the
respective Groups
and Users
entries (from the beginning of the respective
section). Since User and Group records are 8-byte aligned, u29
is used.
Complete file structure
Each section is padded to 64 bytes.
SECTION SIZE DESCRIPTION
Header 48 see "Turbonss header" section
bdz_gid ? bdz(gid)
bdz_groupname ? bdz(groupname)
bdz_uid ? bdz(uid)
bdz_username ? bdz(username)
idx_gid2group len(group)*4 bdz->offset Groups
idx_groupname2group len(group)*4 bdz->offset Groups
idx_uid2user len(user)*4 bdz->offset Users
idx_name2user len(user)*4 bdz->offset Users
shellIndex len(shells)*2 shell index array
shellBlob <= 4032 shell data blob (max 63*64 bytes)
groups ? packed Group entries (8b padding)
users ? packed User entries (8b padding)
groupMembers ? per-group delta varint memberlist (no padding)
userGids ? per-user delta varint gidlist (no padding)
Section creation order:
- ✅
bdz_*
. No depdendencies. - ✅
shellIndex
,shellBlob
. No dependencies. - ✅ userGids. No dependencies.
- ✅ Users. Requires
userGids
and shell. - ✅ Groupmembers. Requires Users.
- ✅ Groups. Requires Groupmembers.
- ✅
idx_*
. Requires offsets to Groups and Users. - Header.