BIO_nwrite0 not implemented

[FrothyB]

Version

5.7.6

Description

The OpenSSL extra compatibility API defines

#define BIO_nwrite0 wolfSSL_BIO_nwrite0

However this is not actually implemented, there is only

WOLFSSL_API int wolfSSL_BIO_nwrite(WOLFSSL_BIO *bio, char **buf, int num);

I have so far worked around this with BIO_nwrite(.., .., 0);

However I'm not sure how robust this is. Is it the intended approach? There is also the issue that without BIO_nwrite0, it is not clear to me how to cleanly and reliably know how much capacity the BIO has. Are there any plans to implement this other variant? Do you have any guidelines or recommendations? There is no example code using BIO_nwrite.

For added context, I am trying to avoid copies when using SSL on top of io_uring and I set the BIOs for the sockets as follows:

BIO_new_bio_pair(&internal_bio, internal_bio_sz, &network_bio, network_bio_sz);
SSL_set_bio(ssl, internal_bio, internal_bio);

For receiving, I read into the network_bio, then BIO_nwrite to register the write, then SSL_read.

[anhu]

Hi, I've asked the developer who added the macro about it. Please stay tuned.

[anhu]

Hi, I've assigned my colleague, Jacob, to comment on this.

[JacobBarthelmeh]

Hi @FrothyB that macro was added back in 2016, likely at that time BIO_nread0 was required but not BIO_nwrite0. I think it was a duplicate, accidentally added to match BIO_nread0 in the header file. There is not currently plans to implement BIO_nwrite0 but I can add it to the feature request list.

Using BIO_nwrite(...,...,0) seems like a good work around. As you mention though -- I do not see a good way to get the BIO's capacity similar to the return value of BIO_nwrite0().

Can you tell us some more about the use case? If wanting to send more details in private contact the support@wolfssl.com email list. Knowing if this is for an open source project or more details in general could help with how we prioritize the feature request.

[FrothyB]

I'm currently just performing some benchmarking of different approaches to networking and SSL. io_uring is nowadays showing some nice performance improvements in both latency and throughput vs the traditional sockets API, especially on more recent kernels. It's also nicer to use. I wanted to try and get the most out of it, which includes trying different SSL libraries, with wolfSSL showing a lot of promise as a more performant option.

io_uring does not really mesh with the traditional SSL APIs - you select a buffer at the time of preparing the read op in which to get the data. So to avoid a copy in userspace, I need the SSL layer to give me a buffer to receive directly in to. As far as I'm aware, BIOs and nread/nwrite are the only way to do this, and this approach with the BIO pair is the only one I got working (there is shockingly little documentation or example code online, perhaps I could help by producing something small and self-contained but I am quite busy right now).

BIO_nwrite0 is needed to do the above properly/cleanly - that said the hack with BIO_nwrite(..,..,0) can work with some caution from the user (e.g. have a network BIO with capacity for at least two frames, receive with a max of one frame size, etc).

To summarize, io_uring seems to me to be the way forward for Linux kernel networking, and BIO_nwrite0 is necesssary to avoid copies while using it and to do so robustly. Therefore I think it would benefit WolfSSL to have this support.

[JacobBarthelmeh]

Thanks @FrothyB, how did the benchmarking go? I have added BIO_nwrite0 to our feature request list and removed the unimplemented function macro in this PR (#9523). Am going to go ahead and close this out but please reach out to us at support @ wolfssl.com for timelines on adding BIO_nwrite0 if needed and if we can help with the benchmarking.