Re: [MirageOS-devel] Netback, Xen grants and a Linux panic

[Thomas Leonard <talex5@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 21 December 2015 at 10:42, Thomas Leonard <talex5@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I'm trying to use a Mirage Xen unikernel to provide networking to
> other client VMs, using the experimental new netback support [1].
>
> It works fine when the client is also a Mirage unikernel, but Linux
> clients kernel panic:

OK, mystery solved! There was a bug in TX.Response.write that meant it
didn't set the ID field. Since the slot had just been used for the
Request, the gref field from the request ended up being sent as the id
field in the reply.

The Linux netfront driver doesn't check that the ID it got back
corresponds to one it actually sent, but just takes whatever's at that
index in its table (or whatever is at the location that would be that
index of the table if the table were that big). This is typically 0,
which it interprets as grant ref 0 rather than "invalid" and then
complains that ref 0 is still mapped.

The Mirage netfront driver always uses the gref as the ID, so it
worked anyway there.

Actually, using the gref as ID doesn't make sense, because two
requests can share the same gref. Lwt_ring didn't notice, because it
uses Hashtbl.add instead of Hashtbl.replace and so allows multiple
requests with the same ID. Presumably they get ack'd in the wrong
order, causing some pages to be returned to the free pool too soon.
Will fix...


-- 
Dr Thomas Leonard        http://roscidus.com/blog/
GPG: DA98 25AE CAD0 8975 7CDA  BD8E 0713 3F96 CA74 D8BA

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