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Jakub Kicinski 4cb163e9ef net: consume xmit errors of GSO frames
[ Upstream commit 7aa767d0d3 ]

udpgro_frglist.sh and udpgro_bench.sh are the flakiest tests
currently in NIPA. They fail in the same exact way, TCP GRO
test stalls occasionally and the test gets killed after 10min.

These tests use veth to simulate GRO. They attach a trivial
("return XDP_PASS;") XDP program to the veth to force TSO off
and NAPI on.

Digging into the failure mode we can see that the connection
is completely stuck after a burst of drops. The sender's snd_nxt
is at sequence number N [1], but the receiver claims to have
received (rcv_nxt) up to N + 3 * MSS [2]. Last piece of the puzzle
is that senders rtx queue is not empty (let's say the block in
the rtx queue is at sequence number N - 4 * MSS [3]).

In this state, sender sends a retransmission from the rtx queue
with a single segment, and sequence numbers N-4*MSS:N-3*MSS [3].
Receiver sees it and responds with an ACK all the way up to
N + 3 * MSS [2]. But sender will reject this ack as TCP_ACK_UNSENT_DATA
because it has no recollection of ever sending data that far out [1].
And we are stuck.

The root cause is the mess of the xmit return codes. veth returns
an error when it can't xmit a frame. We end up with a loss event
like this:

  -------------------------------------------------
  |   GSO super frame 1   |   GSO super frame 2   |
  |-----------------------------------------------|
  | seg | seg | seg | seg | seg | seg | seg | seg |
  |  1  |  2  |  3  |  4  |  5  |  6  |  7  |  8  |
  -------------------------------------------------
     x    ok    ok    <ok>|  ok    ok    ok   <x>
                          \\
			   snd_nxt

"x" means packet lost by veth, and "ok" means it went thru.
Since veth has TSO disabled in this test it sees individual segments.
Segment 1 is on the retransmit queue and will be resent.

So why did the sender not advance snd_nxt even tho it clearly did
send up to seg 8? tcp_write_xmit() interprets the return code
from the core to mean that data has not been sent at all. Since
TCP deals with GSO super frames, not individual segment the crux
of the problem is that loss of a single segment can be interpreted
as loss of all. TCP only sees the last return code for the last
segment of the GSO frame (in <> brackets in the diagram above).

Of course for the problem to occur we need a setup or a device
without a Qdisc. Otherwise Qdisc layer disconnects the protocol
layer from the device errors completely.

We have multiple ways to fix this.

 1) make veth not return an error when it lost a packet.
    While this is what I think we did in the past, the issue keeps
    reappearing and it's annoying to debug. The game of whack
    a mole is not great.

 2) fix the damn return codes
    We only talk about NETDEV_TX_OK and NETDEV_TX_BUSY in the
    documentation, so maybe we should make the return code from
    ndo_start_xmit() a boolean. I like that the most, but perhaps
    some ancient, not-really-networking protocol would suffer.

 3) make TCP ignore the errors
    It is not entirely clear to me what benefit TCP gets from
    interpreting the result of ip_queue_xmit()? Specifically once
    the connection is established and we're pushing data - packet
    loss is just packet loss?

 4) this fix
    Ignore the rc in the Qdisc-less+GSO case, since it's unreliable.
    We already always return OK in the TCQ_F_CAN_BYPASS case.
    In the Qdisc-less case let's be a bit more conservative and only
    mask the GSO errors. This path is taken by non-IP-"networks"
    like CAN, MCTP etc, so we could regress some ancient thing.
    This is the simplest, but also maybe the hackiest fix?

Similar fix has been proposed by Eric in the past but never committed
because original reporter was working with an OOT driver and wasn't
providing feedback (see Link).

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/CANn89iJcLepEin7EtBETrZ36bjoD9LrR=k4cfwWh046GB+4f9A@mail.gmail.com
Fixes: 1f59533f9c ("qdisc: validate frames going through the direct_xmit path")
Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260223235100.108939-1-kuba@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Paolo Abeni <pabeni@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>
History 2026-03-04 07:20:52 -05:00
arch arm64: hugetlbpage: avoid unused-but-set-parameter warning (gcc-16) 2026-03-04 07:20:42 -05:00
block block: decouple secure erase size limit from discard size limit 2026-03-04 07:19:38 -05:00
certs sign-file,extract-cert: use pkcs11 provider for OPENSSL MAJOR >= 3 2024-09-20 19:52:48 +03:00
crypto crypto: authencesn - reject too-short AAD (assoclen<8) to match ESP/ESN spec 2026-01-30 10:32:12 +01:00
Documentation ipv6: Move ipv6_fl_list from ipv6_pinfo to inet_sock. 2026-03-04 07:20:44 -05:00
drivers net/mlx5e: Fix "scheduling while atomic" in IPsec MAC address query 2026-03-04 07:20:52 -05:00
fs erofs: fix interlaced plain identification for encoded extents 2026-03-04 07:20:50 -05:00
include net: add a common function to compute features for upper devices 2026-03-04 07:20:50 -05:00
init printk changes for 6.18 2025-10-04 11:13:11 -07:00
io_uring io_uring/timeout: annotate data race in io_flush_timeouts() 2026-03-04 07:19:36 -05:00
ipc ipc: don't audit capability check in ipc_permissions() 2026-02-26 14:59:19 -08:00
kernel Remove WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM kernel config option 2026-03-04 07:20:46 -05:00
lib Remove WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM kernel config option 2026-03-04 07:20:46 -05:00
LICENSES LICENSES: Replace the obsolete address of the FSF in the GFDL-1.2 2025-07-24 11:15:39 +02:00
mm mm/slab: fix false lockdep warning in __kfree_rcu_sheaf() 2026-02-26 14:59:14 -08:00
net net: consume xmit errors of GSO frames 2026-03-04 07:20:52 -05:00
rust rust: cpufreq: always inline functions using build_assert with arguments 2026-03-04 07:19:37 -05:00
samples samples/ftrace: Adjust LoongArch register restore order in direct calls 2026-01-08 10:17:11 +01:00
scripts modpost: Amend ppc64 save/restfpr symnames for -Os build 2026-03-04 07:20:07 -05:00
security apparmor: fix aa_label to return state from compount and component match 2026-02-26 14:59:42 -08:00
sound ALSA: hda/hdmi: Add quirk for TUXEDO IBS14G6 2026-03-04 07:20:42 -05:00
tools rtla: Fix NULL pointer dereference in actions_parse 2026-03-04 07:20:13 -05:00
usr gen_init_cpio: Ignore fsync() returning EINVAL on pipes 2025-10-07 09:53:05 -07:00
virt KVM: Don't clobber irqfd routing type when deassigning irqfd 2026-02-11 13:41:44 +01:00
.clang-format memblock: drop for_each_free_mem_pfn_range_in_zone_from() 2025-09-14 08:49:03 +03:00
.clippy.toml rust: clean Rust 1.88.0's warning about clippy::disallowed_macros configuration 2025-05-07 00:11:47 +02:00
.cocciconfig scripts: add Linux .cocciconfig for coccinelle 2016-07-22 12:13:39 +02:00
.editorconfig .editorconfig: remove trim_trailing_whitespace option 2024-06-13 16:47:52 +02:00
.get_maintainer.ignore MAINTAINERS: remove Alyssa Rosenzweig 2025-09-18 21:17:31 +02:00
.gitattributes .gitattributes: set diff driver for Rust source code files 2023-05-31 17:48:25 +02:00
.gitignore .gitignore: ignore compile_commands.json globally 2025-08-12 15:53:55 -07:00
.mailmap 8 hotfixes. 4 are cc:stable, 7 are against mm/. 2025-11-26 12:38:05 -08:00
.pylintrc tools: docs: parse-headers.py: move it from sphinx dir 2025-08-29 15:54:42 -06:00
.rustfmt.toml rust: add .rustfmt.toml 2022-09-28 09:02:20 +02:00
COPYING COPYING: state that all contributions really are covered by this file 2020-02-10 13:32:20 -08:00
CREDITS MAINTAINERS: mark ISDN subsystem as orphan 2025-10-27 17:49:45 -07:00
Kbuild sched: Make migrate_{en,dis}able() inline 2025-09-25 09:57:16 +02:00
Kconfig io_uring: Rename KConfig to Kconfig 2025-02-19 14:53:27 -07:00
MAINTAINERS soc: fixes for 6.18, part 4 2025-11-28 09:57:31 -08:00
Makefile Linux 6.18.15 2026-02-27 16:05:10 -05:00
README README: Fix spelling 2024-03-18 03:36:32 -06:00

Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.  The formatted documentation can also be read online at:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the reStructuredText markup notation.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.