Re: VLAN packets silently dropped in promiscuous mode

[Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>]

Le vendredi 01 octobre 2010 à 07:10 +0200, Eric Dumazet a écrit :
> Le jeudi 30 septembre 2010 à 19:37 -0700, Jesse Gross a écrit :
> 
> > That's true.  Dropping here seems roughly equivalent to the effects of
> > a hardware VLAN filter, which will also not be tracked by a counter,
> > so that seems not too bad to me.
> > 
> > The thing that concerns me though is why so many drivers seem to have
> > this problem with completely dropping the VLAN header.  I know that
> > even several of the ones that work now were broken initially and had
> > to be fixed.  Seeing as the driver drops the VLAN information before
> > it gets to the general networking code I don't see a generic fix to
> > this as it is currently setup.  However, perhaps we could make it so
> > that it is harder to get wrong.  Something like this:
> > 
> > * Allow vlan_gro_receive() to take a NULL VLAN group and a tag of 0
> > (and do the same thing for vlan_hwaccel_rx())
> > * Now that the vlan functions can deal with non-VLAN packets, merge
> > them into their non-VLAN counterparts.
> > * We can now demultiplex between the VLAN/non-VLAN case in core
> > networking.  This is done anyways, it just prevents every driver from
> > needing that code block I copied above and allows us to fix these
> > types of problems centrally.
> > * Dump the VLAN tag into the SKB and hand off the packet to the
> > various consumers: VLAN devices, libpcap, bridge hook (not currently
> > done but should be for trunking).
> > 
> > I see a number of advantages of this:
> > * Fixes all the problems with cards dropping VLAN headers at once.
> > * Avoids having to disable VLAN acceleration when in promiscuous mode
> > (good for bridging since it always puts devices in promiscuous mode).
> > * Keeps VLAN tag separate until given to ultimate consumer, which
> > avoids needing to do header reconstruction as in tg3 unless absolutely
> > necessary.
> > * Consolidates common driver code in core networking.
> 
> This seems very reasonable ;)

Jesse, do you plan to work on this stuff yourself in a near future ?