linux-wireless.vger.kernel.org archive mirror
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>
To: Ben Greear <greearb@candelatech.com>
Cc: Felix Fietkau <nbd@openwrt.org>, linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] mac80211:  Limit number of pending skbs.
Date: Wed, 30 May 2012 09:03:08 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1338361388.4511.3.camel@jlt3.sipsolutions.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <4FC55BE7.7010807@candelatech.com> (sfid-20120530_012950_634296_DA1EEA8E)

On Tue, 2012-05-29 at 16:29 -0700, Ben Greear wrote:
> On 05/29/2012 04:23 PM, Felix Fietkau wrote:
> > On 2012-05-30 1:02 AM, greearb@candelatech.com wrote:
> >> From: Ben Greear<greearb@candelatech.com>
> >>
> >> Current code will allow any number of pending skbs, and
> >> this can OOM the system when used with something like
> >> the pktgen tool (which may not back off properly if
> >> queue is stopped).
> >>
> >> Possibly this is just a bug in our version of pktgen,
> >> but either way, it seems reasonable to add a limit
> >> so that it is not possible to go OOM in this manner.
> >>
> >> Signed-off-by: Ben Greear<greearb@candelatech.com>
> > Adding a module parameter in a workaround for a possibly broken module
> > seems a bit excessive to me.
> >
> > Also, I'm not sure adding such a silent packet drop is a good idea. At
> > the very least, it should complain loudly to encourage people to fix the
> > actual bug instead of just papering over it.
> >
> > When the driver cannot accept more packets, the queue stop should
> > prevent the network stack from spamming mac80211 with more packets. Your
> > pktgen seems to be ignoring this, so please fix it instead of adding
> > workarounds to mac80211.
> 
> Ok, I'll work on pktgen next time I get a chance.
> 
> I recall I had to add a hack (that was not wanted upstream)
> to get pktgen to even work with mac80211 interfaces w/out crashing
> the kernel, so probably no one else is using it anyway.

There used to be bugs in this area in mac80211 and/or pktgen, and I
remember crashing my machine very trivially. I don't think that this is
still a problem though, but I haven't tried in a long time. FWIW, the
time-frame of this must've been ~2-3 years ago.

johannes


  reply	other threads:[~2012-05-30  7:03 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2012-05-29 23:02 [PATCH] mac80211: Limit number of pending skbs greearb
2012-05-29 23:23 ` Felix Fietkau
2012-05-29 23:29   ` Ben Greear
2012-05-30  7:03     ` Johannes Berg [this message]
2012-05-30 16:04       ` Ben Greear
2012-05-30 16:09         ` Johannes Berg
2012-05-30 16:14           ` Ben Greear

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=1338361388.4511.3.camel@jlt3.sipsolutions.net \
    --to=johannes@sipsolutions.net \
    --cc=greearb@candelatech.com \
    --cc=linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org \
    --cc=nbd@openwrt.org \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).