1. 28 7月, 2009 1 次提交
    • J
      iwlwifi: fix TX queue race · 3995bd93
      Johannes Berg 提交于
      I had a problem on 4965 hardware (well, probably other hardware too,
      but others don't survive my stress testing right now, unfortunately)
      where the driver was sending invalid commands to the device, but no
      such thing could be seen from the driver's point of view. I could
      reproduce this fairly easily by sending multiple TCP streams with
      iperf on different TIDs, though sometimes a single iperf stream was
      sufficient. It even happened with a single core, but I have forced
      preemption turned on.
      
      The culprit was a queue overrun, where we advanced the queue's write
      pointer over the read pointer. After careful analysis I've come to
      the conclusion that the cause is a race condition between iwlwifi
      and mac80211.
      
      mac80211, of course, checks whether the queue is stopped, before
      transmitting a frame. This effectively looks like this:
      
              lock(queues)
              if (stopped(queue)) {
                      unlock(queues)
                      return busy;
      	}
              unlock(queues)
              ...             <-- this place will be important
      			    there is some more code here
              drv_tx(frame)
      
      The driver, on the other hand, can stop and start queues, which does
      
              lock(queues)
              mark_running/stopped(queue)
              unlock(queues)
      
      	[if marked running: wake up tasklet to send pending frames]
      
      Now, however, once the driver starts the queue, mac80211 can see that
      and end up at the marked place above, at which point for some reason the
      driver seems to stop the queue again (I don't understand that) and then
      we end up transmitting while the queue is actually full.
      
      Now, this shouldn't actually matter much, but for some reason I've seen
      it happen multiple times in a row and the queue actually overflows, at
      which point the queue bites itself in the tail and things go completely
      wrong.
      
      This patch fixes this by just dropping the packet should this have
      happened, and making the lock in iwlwifi cover everything so iwlwifi
      can't race against itself (dropping the lock there might make it more
      likely, but it did seem to happen without that too).
      
      Since we can't hold the lock across drv_tx() above, I see no way to fix
      this in mac80211, but I also don't understand why I haven't seen this
      before -- maybe I just never stress tested it this badly.
      
      With this patch, the device has survived many minutes of simultanously
      sending two iperf streams on different TIDs with combined throughput
      of about 60 Mbps.
      Signed-off-by: NJohannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>
      Signed-off-by: NReinette Chatre <reinette.chatre@intel.com>
      Signed-off-by: NJohn W. Linville <linville@tuxdriver.com>
      3995bd93
  2. 27 7月, 2009 10 次提交
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