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Re: [Xen-devel] Is: SKB_MAX_LEN bites again. Was: Re: bug disabling guest interface


  • To: xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • From: Steven Haigh <netwiz@xxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2013 02:05:14 +1100
  • Delivery-date: Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:05:44 +0000
  • List-id: Xen developer discussion <xen-devel.lists.xen.org>

On 03/13/2013 01:56 AM, Ian Campbell wrote:
On Tue, 2013-03-12 at 14:49 +0000, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
On Fri, Mar 08, 2013 at 11:09:56PM +0100, Jacek Milewicz wrote:
Is there any further information on a possible fix for this?
Thoughts?
Ideas? As it seems to be hitting multiple sites, I'd like to get it
fixed asap...

There are 3 ways I can see this fixed:
- update guests so all have same MAX_SKB_FRAGS (that includes windows
drivers (windows drivers use 19 for MAX_SKB_FRAGS)) -add some sort of
negotiation between host and guest
- change MAX_SKB_FRAGS to 19 to accommodate all guests

Unfortunately first one requires changes to the guest and most don't
have that luxury. So the only way I see it could be fixed without
breaking compatibility even more  is

Ugh. The negotiations between host and guest is probably the best
choice.
The issues you are going to hit are that you might need to redo the skbs
to
match what the frontend's max is.

Annie, Wei, Ian - were there some RFC patches floating around for this?


As much as I agree that negotiation is the best option in long term. It
relies on people upgrading their kernels - and this is not the case (only
people running kernels from before 2011-12-23 are affected by this bug
(I'm not sure about other platforms)).
And in a lot of cases (VPS providers) there is no easy way to upgrade
guest kernels.

Sure. The other option in the xen-netback might be a configurable option
to let net-back know that it is running with older guests which expect
18 size MAX_SKB_FRAGS. That way we have the negotiation part, the code to
deal with backend MAX_SKB_FRAGS != frontend MAX_SKB_FRAGS and the value that
the system admin provides.

I think this is over complicating things. netback can and should be
modified to be able to cope with guests using frags == 18 (or larger)
even if it only itself supports frags == 16 by coalescing things in the
obvious way. This works for all guest supplied frames up to 64K in size,
regardless of the number of slots they use to represent that 64K.

On this, while we just hacked this in the kernel source to increase MAX_SKB_FRAGS to 19, I believe Jacek Milewicz tested 18 to work fine on linux guests, but it seems Windows guests would still fail unless it was increased to 19.

--
Steven Haigh

Email: netwiz@xxxxxxxxx
Web: https://www.crc.id.au
Phone: (03) 9001 6090 - 0412 935 897
Fax: (03) 8338 0299

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