The issue is reported by Yihuang Yu who have 'netperf' test on NVidia's grace-grace and grace-hopper machines. The 'netperf' client is started in the VM hosted by grace-hopper machine, while the 'netperf' server is running on grace-grace machine. The VM is started with virtio-net and vhost has been enabled. We observe a error message spew from VM and then soft-lockup report. The error message indicates the data associated with the descriptor (index: 135) has been released, and the queue is marked as broken. It eventually leads to the endless effort to fetch free buffer (skb) in drivers/net/virtio_net.c::start_xmit() and soft-lockup. The stale index 135 is fetched from the available ring and published to the used ring by vhost, meaning we have disordred write to the available ring element and available index. /home/gavin/sandbox/qemu.main/build/qemu-system-aarch64 \ -accel kvm -machine virt,gic-version=host \ : \ -netdev tap,id=vnet0,vhost=on \ -device virtio-net-pci,bus=pcie.8,netdev=vnet0,mac=52:54:00:f1:26:b0 \ [ 19.993158] virtio_net virtio1: output.0:id 135 is not a head! Fix the issue by replacing virtio_wmb(vq->weak_barriers) with stronger virtio_mb(false), equivalent to replaced 'dmb' by 'dsb' instruction on ARM64. It should work for other architectures, but performance loss is expected. Cc: stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Reported-by: Yihuang Yu <yihyu@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Gavin Shan <gshan@xxxxxxxxxx> --- drivers/virtio/virtio_ring.c | 12 +++++++++--- 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) diff --git a/drivers/virtio/virtio_ring.c b/drivers/virtio/virtio_ring.c index 49299b1f9ec7..7d852811c912 100644 --- a/drivers/virtio/virtio_ring.c +++ b/drivers/virtio/virtio_ring.c @@ -687,9 +687,15 @@ static inline int virtqueue_add_split(struct virtqueue *_vq, avail = vq->split.avail_idx_shadow & (vq->split.vring.num - 1); vq->split.vring.avail->ring[avail] = cpu_to_virtio16(_vq->vdev, head); - /* Descriptors and available array need to be set before we expose the - * new available array entries. */ - virtio_wmb(vq->weak_barriers); + /* + * Descriptors and available array need to be set before we expose + * the new available array entries. virtio_wmb() should be enough + * to ensuere the order theoretically. However, a stronger barrier + * is needed by ARM64. Otherwise, the stale data can be observed + * by the host (vhost). A stronger barrier should work for other + * architectures, but performance loss is expected. + */ + virtio_mb(false); vq->split.avail_idx_shadow++; vq->split.vring.avail->idx = cpu_to_virtio16(_vq->vdev, vq->split.avail_idx_shadow); -- 2.44.0