When the Qemu launched with vhost but without tap vnet_hdr, vhost tries to copy vnet_hdr from socket iter with size 0 to the page that may contain some trash. That trash can be interpreted as unpredictable values for vnet_hdr. That leads to dropping some packets and in some cases to stalling vhost routine when the vhost_net tries to process packets and fails in a loop. Qemu options: -netdev tap,vhost=on,vnet_hdr=off,... >From security point of view, wrong values on field used later tap's tap_get_user_xdp() and will affect skb gso and options. Later the header(and data in headroom) should not be used by the stack. Using custom socket as a backend to vhost_net can reveal some data in the vnet_hdr, although it would require kernel access to implement. The issue happens because the value of sock_len in virtqueue is 0. That value is set at vhost_net_set_features() with VHOST_NET_F_VIRTIO_NET_HDR, also it's set to zero at device open() and reset() routine. So, currently, to trigger the issue, we need to set up qemu with vhost=on,vnet_hdr=off, or do not configure vhost in the custom program. Signed-off-by: Andrew Melnychenko <andrew@xxxxxxxxxx> --- drivers/vhost/net.c | 3 +++ 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+) diff --git a/drivers/vhost/net.c b/drivers/vhost/net.c index f2ed7167c848..57411ac2d08b 100644 --- a/drivers/vhost/net.c +++ b/drivers/vhost/net.c @@ -735,6 +735,9 @@ static int vhost_net_build_xdp(struct vhost_net_virtqueue *nvq, hdr = buf; gso = &hdr->gso; + if (!sock_hlen) + memset(buf, 0, pad); + if ((gso->flags & VIRTIO_NET_HDR_F_NEEDS_CSUM) && vhost16_to_cpu(vq, gso->csum_start) + vhost16_to_cpu(vq, gso->csum_offset) + 2 > -- 2.43.0