Re: [PATCH] pktgen: Clone skb to avoid corruption of skbs in ndo_start_xmit methods

Eric Dumazet
2011-07-20T00:43:18Z

Le mardi 19 juillet 2011 à 20:19 -0400, Neil Horman a écrit :
> >
> You are correct Eric, this can cause a significant performance regression, but I
> think that beats causing a panic or other unexpected behavior. I read your
> previous threads with others regarding fixing this with vlans, but I don't think
> its fair to just say 'its fast, but it might cause oopses'.
>
> And its not sufficient to simply forbid soft drivers to make use of pktgen, its
> not just a soft driver problem, its systemic. Any driver which assumes that it
> has exclusive access to an skb submitted for transmit is at risk from pktgen in
> its current implementation. That of course as a subset includes all the soft
> drivers, but others are also suceptible. As examples (some of which I noted in
> the origional post) virtio_net uses the skb->cb to hold vnet header information
> which will be corrupted on sucessive sends. bnx2x linearizes skbs under certain
> circumstances, which means pktgen, if it marshals a fragmented frame will not
> send a fragmented frame after the first iteration. The PPP and Slip drivers
> skb_push the skb to prepend a header to the frame on send, meaning sucessive
> uses, up until they get an skb_under_panic will get iteratively more malformed
> frames on the wire as ppp headers get stacked on top of one another. These are
> ust a few of the examples I've found.
>
> The long and the short of it in my mind, is that we have a fundamental
> disconnect between driver asumptions and pktgen. If its ok to submit shared
> skbs to drivers, then we need to augment drivers that modify skbs on transmit to
> clone the skb (likey not an efficient solution), or if its not ok to do so, we
> need to change pktgen to not behave that way.
>

Its a known problem, please check mail archives. Nobody felt a fix was
needed.

> > Note : a sysadmin has other ways to make a machine panic or reboot or
> > halt...
> Yes, predictable ways, that the sysadmin can see coming based on what they're
> doing (i.e. no one should be shocked if they dd /dev/random to /dev/kmem and get
> a hang or panic, or if they issue a sysrq-c, etc). This case is different. A
> sysadmin reasonably expects pktgen to send the frames they configure on the
> interface they specify. While its arguably reasonable to forsee that it may not
> work with soft interfaces, pktgen just won't work with some hardware drivers (as
> per the examples above). And it won't always be an oops, it may be occasional
> random behvaior in the output data, and its highly dependent not just on the use
> of pktgen, but rather the specific command(s) issued.
>
>
> I'm sensitive to the performance impact, but I would much rather see a lower
> performing pktgen that doesn't randomly crash, and bring the performance back up
> in a safe, reliable way. To that end, I've been starting to think about
> pre-allocating a ring buffer of skbs with a skb->users count biased up to
> prevent driver freeing. That way we could detect 'unused skb's' by a user count
> that was at the bias level. Thoughts?
>

I dont know. I use pktgen maybe once per week and never got a single
crash like this. We probably are very few pktgen users in the world, and
we use it exactly to avoid calling skb_clone() or other expensive per
xmit setup.

Just remove pktgen from RedHat kernels, if you dont trust sysadmins.
# CONFIG_PKTGEN is not set

Alternatively, add a check to problematic drivers to _not_ mess skb if
skb_shared(skb) is true : eventually use skb_share_check()