Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] tap: avoid deadlocking rx

[Neil Skrypuch]

On Saturday 08 March 2014 16:00:43 Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> The net subsystem has a control flow mechanism so peer NetClientStates
> can tell each other to stop sending packets.  This is used to stop
> monitoring the tap file descriptor for incoming packets if the guest rx
> ring has no spare buffers.
> 
> There is a corner case when tap_can_send() is true at the beginning of
> an event loop iteration but becomes false before the tap_send() fd
> handler is invoked.
> 
> tap_send() will read the packet from the tap file descriptor and attempt
> to send it.  The net queue will hold on to the packet and return 0,
> indicating that further I/O is not possible.  tap then stops monitoring
> the file descriptor for reads.
> 
> This is unlike the normal case where tap_can_send() is the same before
> and during the event loop iteration.  The event loop would simply not
> monitor the file descriptor if tap_can_send() returns true.  Upon next
> iteration it would check tap_can_send() again and begin monitoring if we
> can send.
> 
> The deadlock happens because tap_send() explicitly disabled read_poll.
> This is done with the expectation that the peer will call
> qemu_net_queue_flush().  But hw/net/virtio-net.c does not monitor
> vm_running transitions and issue the flush.  Hence we're left with a
> broken tap device.
> 
> Cc: address@hidden
> Reported-by: Neil Skrypuch <address@hidden>
> Signed-off-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <address@hidden>
> ---
>  net/tap.c | 7 +++++--
>  1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/net/tap.c b/net/tap.c
> index 2d5099b..8847ce1 100644
> --- a/net/tap.c
> +++ b/net/tap.c
> @@ -190,7 +190,7 @@ static void tap_send(void *opaque)
>      TAPState *s = opaque;
>      int size;
> 
> -    do {
> +    while (qemu_can_send_packet(&s->nc)) {
>          uint8_t *buf = s->buf;
> 
>          size = tap_read_packet(s->fd, s->buf, sizeof(s->buf));
> @@ -206,8 +206,11 @@ static void tap_send(void *opaque)
>          size = qemu_send_packet_async(&s->nc, buf, size,
> tap_send_completed); if (size == 0) {
>              tap_read_poll(s, false);
> +            break;
> +        } else if (size < 0) {
> +            break;
>          }
> -    } while (size > 0 && qemu_can_send_packet(&s->nc));
> +    }
>  }
> 
>  static bool tap_has_ufo(NetClientState *nc)

Tested-by: Neil Skrypuch <address@hidden>

With this patch applied, I've observed over 1000 migrations with no failures 
through my test harness. Without the above patch, that would be virtually 
impossible, so, looks good to me.

Thanks!

- Neil