Selective Packet Discard (SPD)

Overview

Selective Packet Discard (SPD) is a mechanism to manage the process level input queues on the Route Processor (RP). The goal of SPD is to provide priority to routing protocol packets and other important traffic control Layer 2 keepalives during periods of process level queue congestion.

Historically, on platforms such as the Cisco 7x00 and non-Cisco Express Forwarding (CEF) 7500 systems, significant numbers of transit packets were forwarded by the Route Processor in order to populate the fast switching cache. Consequently, SPD was required in this case to prioritize the routing protocol packets over the transit packets which share the same queue.

Currently, on the Cisco 12000 Series Internet Router and on the 7500 running CEF, only traffic destined to the router itself is sent to process level. In this case, SPD is used to prioritize routing protocol packets when management traffic such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is present or when a Denial of Service (DoS) attack sending traffic to the RP is occurring.

The SPD Process

On the Cisco 12000 Series, when a line card determines that an incoming packet needs to be punted to the RP for processing, the packet travels across the switch fabric as Cisco Cells and is eventually received by the Cisco Cell Segmentation and Reassembly (CSAR) Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA).

Its purpose is to handle the traffic between the switch fabric and the RP CPU, and this is where the SPD checks are performed. This applies to IP packets, Connectionless Network Service (CLNS) packets, Layer 2 keepalives, and similar packets punted to the RP. SPD makes two checks and can potentially drop a packet in one of these two states:

• SPD state check
• Input queue check

SPD State Check

The IP process queue on the RP is divided into two parts: a general packet queue and a priority queue. Packets put in the general packet queue are subject to the SPD state check, and those that are put in the priority queue are not. Packets that qualify for the priority packet queue are high priority packets such as those of IP precedence 6 or 7 and should never be dropped. The non-qualifiers, however, can be dropped here depending on the length of the general packet queue depending on the SPD state. The general packet queue can be in three states and, as such, the low priority packets may be serviced differently:

• NORMAL: queue size <= min
• RANDOM DROP: min <= queue size <= max
• FULL DROP: max <= queue size

In the NORMAL state, we never drop well-formed and malformed packets.

In the RANDOM DROP state, we randomly drop well-formed packets. If aggressive mode is configured, we drop all malformed packets; otherwise, we treat them as well-formed packets.

Note: These random drops are called SPD flushes. Basically, when the interface gets overloaded, flushes occur. Buffer misses cause the flush counter to increment.

In FULL DROP state, we drop all well-formed and malformed packets. These minimum (default 73) and maximum (default 74) values are derived from the smallest hold-queue on the chassis, but can be overridden with the global commands ip spd queue min-threshold and ip spd queue max-threshold.