Subject: XDP_TX bug report on mlx4

From: Jesper Dangaard Brouer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2016 21:03:40 +0200

Hi Brenden,

I've discovered a bug with XDP_TX recycling of pages in the mlx4 driver.

If I increase the number of RX and TX queues/channels via ethtool cmd:
 ethtool -L mlx4p1 rx 10 tx 10

Then when running the xdp2 program, which does XDP_TX, the kernel will
crash with page errors, because the page refcnt goes to zero or even
minus.  I've noticed pages delivered to mlx4_en_rx_recycle() can have
a page refcnt of zero, which is wrong, they should always have 1 (for
XDP).

Debugging it further, I find that this can happen when mlx4_en_rx_recycle()
is called from mlx4_en_recycle_tx_desc().  This is the TX cleanup function,
associated with TX ring queues used for XDP_TX only. No others than the
XDP_TX action should be able to place packets into these TX rings
which call mlx4_en_recycle_tx_desc().

Do you have any idea of what could be going wrong in this case?

-- 
Best regards,
  Jesper Dangaard Brouer
  MSc.CS, Principal Kernel Engineer at Red Hat
  Author of http://www.iptv-analyzer.org
  LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/brouer