Re: [RFC] mac80211: lock rate control

[Sven Eckelmann <sven@open-mesh.com>]

On Thursday 05 March 2015 16:37:12 Johannes Berg wrote:
> From: Johannes Berg <johannes.berg@intel.com>
> 
> Both minstrel (reported by Sven Eckelmann) and the iwlwifi rate
> control aren't properly taking concurrency into account. It's
> likely that the same is true for other rate control algorithms.
> 
> In the case of minstrel this manifests itself in crashes when an
> update and other data access are run concurrently, for example
> when the stations change bandwidth or similar. In iwlwifi, this
> can cause firmware crashes.
> 
> Since fixing all rate control algorithms will be very difficult,
> just provide locking for invocations. This protects the internal
> data structures the algorithms maintain.
> 
> I've manipulated hostapd to test this, by having it change its
> advertised bandwidth roughly ever 150ms. At the same time, I'm
> running a flood ping between the client and the AP, which causes
> this race of update vs. get_rate/status to easily happen on the
> client. With this change, the system survives this test.
> 
> Reported-by: Sven Eckelmann <sven@open-mesh.com>
> Signed-off-by: Johannes Berg <johannes.berg@intel.com>

Thanks a lot for the patch. This is mostly what I had in mind when asking for 
the correct lock.

I will ask if it is possible to test this patch in an affected network. But I 
am quite sure that this will not be possible before next week. And your test 
already sounds quite nice.

Kind regards,
	Sven