Re: debug: nt_conntrack and KVM crash

Jon Masters
2010-01-30T01:57:14Z

On Fri, 2010-01-29 at 20:10 -0500, Jon Masters wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I've hooked up Jason's kgb/kgdb patches and been able to gather some
> more information about the most recent crashes on this test system.
>
> The last few crashes have occurred after starting an F12 guest, at which
> point __nf_conntrack_find is called with the following tuple:
>
> --- begin ---
> (gdb) print tuple->src->u3
> $45 = {all = {16777343, 0, 0, 0}, ip = 16777343, ip6 = {16777343, 0, 0,
> 0},
> in = {s_addr = 16777343}, in6 = {in6_u = {
> u6_addr8 = "\177\000\000\001", '\000' <repeats 11 times>,
> u6_addr16 = {
> 127, 256, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0}, u6_addr32 = {16777343, 0, 0, 0}}}}
>
> (gdb) print tuple->src->u
> $46 = {all = 3607, tcp = {port = 3607}, udp = {port = 3607}, icmp = {
> id = 3607}, dccp = {port = 3607}, sctp = {port = 3607}, gre = {key =
> 3607}}
>
> (gdb) print tuple->dst
> $48 = {u3 = {all = {16777343, 0, 0, 0}, ip = 16777343, ip6 = {16777343,
> 0, 0,
> 0}, in = {s_addr = 16777343}, in6 = {in6_u = {
> u6_addr8 = "\177\000\000\001", '\000' <repeats 11 times>,
> u6_addr16 = {
> 127, 256, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0}, u6_addr32 = {16777343, 0, 0,
> 0}}}},
> u = {all = 12761, tcp = {port = 12761}, udp = {port = 12761}, icmp = {
> type = 217 '\331', code = 49 '1'}, dccp = {port = 12761}, sctp = {
> port = 12761}, gre = {key = 12761}}, protonum = 6 '\006', dir = 0
> '\000'}
> ---end ---
>
> Which (after converting from network to host addressing) is a VNC (port
> 5902) TCP packet being broadcast (by the guest maybe? I didn't know
> Fedora started VNC by default these days, but I'll look).
>
> After looking through the netfilter code, I understand now that it
> maintains a hashtable (which size is computed at boot time according to
> system memory size, and is usually kmalloced but might be vmalloced if
> there is a problem - not here though). Each time a packet of interest
> relating to a connection we might want to track comes in, we get a
> "tuple" passed in to the conntrack functions, and this is hashed using
> hash_conntrack into an entry in an array of hlists (buckets) stored in
> the "ct" (conntrack) entry in the current network namespace (there is
> only one on this system, I checked that). In this case, when we come to
> look at the hashtable, it contains a number of valid entries (I looked)
> but not for the hashed entry calculated for this VNC packet.
>
> I would love to have advice on the best way to debug conntrack hashtable
> missbehavior (there's a lot of RCU use in there), especially with
> freeing entries. Is there more debug code I can turn on? Is there
> anything you guys would suggest that I look at?

Ah so I should have realized before but I wasn't looking at valid values
for the range of the hashtable yet, nf_conntrack_htable_size is getting
wildly out of whack. It goes from:

(gdb) print nf_conntrack_hash_rnd
$1 = 2688505299
(gdb) print nf_conntrack_htable_size
$2 = 16384

nf_conntrack_events: 1
nf_conntrack_max: 65536

Shortly after booting, before being NULLed shortly after starting some
virtual machines (the hash isn't reset, whereas it is recomputed if the
hashtable is re-initialized after an intentional resizing operation):

(gdb) print nf_conntrack_hash_rnd
$3 = 2688505299
(gdb) print nf_conntrack_htable_size
$4 = 0

nf_conntrack_events: 1
nf_conntrack_max: 0
nf_conntrack_buckets: 0

Then when I start the third virtual machine:

(gdb) print nf_conntrack_hash_rnd
$15 = 2688505299
(gdb) print nf_conntrack_htable_size
$16 = 2180904176

And we're done. Which is great. But I don't think it's random corruption
since it's reproducible by a number of people on different hardware. So
hopefully for some reason this is being deliberately screwified.

Jon.