Re: serious netpoll bug w/NAPI

[Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>]

On Tue, Feb 08, 2005 at 08:16:34PM -0800, David S. Miller wrote:
> 
> Consider a NAPI device currently executing it's poll function,
> pushing SKBs into the networking stack.
> 
> Some of these will generate response packets etc.
> 
> If for some reason a printk() is generated by the packet processing
> and:
> 
> 1) the netconsole output device is the same as the NAPI device
>    processing packets
> 
> 2) netif_queue_stopped() is true because the tx queue is full
> 
> the netpoll code will recurse back into the driver's poll function.
> This is incredibly illegal and results in all kinds of driver state
> corruption.  ->poll() must execute only once at a time.

On closer inspection, there's a couple other related failure cases
with the new ->poll logic in netpoll. I'm afraid it looks like
CONFIG_NETPOLL will need to guard ->poll() with a per-device spinlock
on netpoll-enabled devices.

This will mean putting a pointer to struct netpoll in struct
net_device (which I should have done in the first place) and will take
a few patches to sort out.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.