Sleeping in atomic context with VLAN and netdev instance lock drivers

Cosmin Ratiu
2025-07-15T15:04:51Z

Hi Stanislav,

There's a bug that was uncovered recently in a kernel with
DEBUG_ATOMIC_SLEEP related to the new netdev instance locking.

I looked a bit into it and I am not sure how to solve it, I'd like your
help. On a netdevice with instance locking enabled which supports
macsec (e.g. mlx5) and a kernel with:
CONFIG_MACSEC=y
CONFIG_MLX5_MACSEC=y
CONFIG_DEBUG_ATOMIC_SLEEP=y

Run these:

IF=eth1
ip link del macsec0
ip link add link $IF macsec0 type macsec sci 3154 cipher gcm-aes-256
encrypt on encodingsa 0
ip link set dev macsec0 up
ip link add link macsec0 name macsec_vlan type vlan id 1
ip link set dev macsec_vlan address 00:11:22:33:44:88
ip link set dev macsec_vlan up

And you get this splat:
# BUG: sleeping function called from invalid context at
kernel/locking/mutex.c:275
# dump_stack_lvl+0x4f/0x60
# __might_resched+0xeb/0x140
# mutex_lock+0x1a/0x40
# dev_set_promiscuity+0x26/0x90
# __dev_set_promiscuity+0x85/0x170
# __dev_set_rx_mode+0x69/0xa0
# dev_uc_add+0x6d/0x80
# vlan_dev_open+0x5f/0x120 [8021q]
# __dev_open+0x10c/0x2a0
# __dev_change_flags+0x1a4/0x210
# netif_change_flags+0x22/0x60
# do_setlink.isra.0+0xdb0/0x10f0
# rtnl_newlink+0x797/0xb00
# rtnetlink_rcv_msg+0x1cb/0x3f0
# netlink_rcv_skb+0x53/0x100
# netlink_unicast+0x273/0x3b0
# netlink_sendmsg+0x1f2/0x430

The problem is taking the netdev instance lock while holding the dev-
>addr_list_lock spinlock.

Any suggestions on how to refactor things to avoid this? Maybe schedule
a wq task from vlan_dev_change_rx_flags instead of synchronously trying
to do the change? I'm not sure that would entirely solve the issue
though.

Cosmin.