netdev - Re: [PATCH 1/4] pch_gbe: Fix transmit queue management

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Date:	Sat, 30 Nov 2013 23:41:06 +0100
From:	Ondřej Pužman <puzman@...il.com>
To:	David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>
CC:	netdev@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/4] pch_gbe: Fix transmit queue management

> Please format your commit  message text to 80 columns.

Ok, no problem. I did not know that 80 columns limitation applies also
for commit messages.

> You should be instead  preventing the transmit method from being
> invoked when it might be possible that a request cannot be
> satisfied. This means that at the end of a transmit request, you must
> stop the queue if a packet with the maximum number of possible
> descriptors cannot be satisfied. Then it is impossible for the
> transmit function to be invoked in a situation where it would need to
> fail for lack of available transmit descriptors. This is why drivers
> decided whether to stop their TX queues based upon calculations
> involving MAX_SKB_FRAGS.

Hmm, correct me if I'm wrong ... but the driver and hardware does not
support scatter-gather DMA. So fragmented skbs can't be passed to
ndo_start_xmit function and each skb passed to the function represents
one packet and one descriptor in tx_ring.
I do not think that in this caseit makes sense to to involve
MAX_SKB_FRAGS in any calculation and the queue should be stopped in the
moment when it gets full.
But maybe I am missing something, I am no expert in this kind of stuff.

--
Ondrej Puzman

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in
the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html