Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: [PATCH V4 net] net: mana: Fix MANA VF unload when host is unresponsive

[Jason Gunthorpe]

On Thu, Jul 06, 2023 at 01:54:35PM +0000, Haiyang Zhang wrote:

> > This waiting loop is needed to let the pending Tx packets be sent. If
> > they weren't sent in 1 second, it most likely makes no sense already
> > whether they will be sent at all or not -- the destination host won't
> > wait for them for so long.
> > You say that it may happen only in case of HW issue. If so, I assume you
> > need to fix it some way, e.g. do a HW reset or so? If so, why bother
> > waiting for Tx completions if Tx is hung? You free all skbs later either
> > way, so there are no leaks.
> 
> At that point, we don't actually care if the pending packets are sent or not. 
> But if we free the queues too soon, and the HW is slow for unexpected 
> reasons, a delayed completion notice will DMA into the freed memory and 
> cause corruption. That's why we have a longer waiting time.

Aieiiie that is a horrible HW design to not have a strong fence of DMA.

"just wait and hope the HW doesn't UAF the kernel with DMA" is really
awful.

Jason