This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled neighbour: Disregard DEAD dst in neigh_update to the 4.4-stable tree which can be found at: http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git;a=summary The filename of the patch is: neighbour-disregard-dead-dst-in-neigh_update.patch and it can be found in the queue-4.4 subdirectory. If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree, please let <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> know about it. commit 1853c5593af858c29b813ea34c1edeae62b63c9c Author: Tong Zhu <zhutong@xxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri Mar 19 14:33:37 2021 -0400 neighbour: Disregard DEAD dst in neigh_update [ Upstream commit d47ec7a0a7271dda08932d6208e4ab65ab0c987c ] After a short network outage, the dst_entry is timed out and put in DST_OBSOLETE_DEAD. We are in this code because arp reply comes from this neighbour after network recovers. There is a potential race condition that dst_entry is still in DST_OBSOLETE_DEAD. With that, another neighbour lookup causes more harm than good. In best case all packets in arp_queue are lost. This is counterproductive to the original goal of finding a better path for those packets. I observed a worst case with 4.x kernel where a dst_entry in DST_OBSOLETE_DEAD state is associated with loopback net_device. It leads to an ethernet header with all zero addresses. A packet with all zero source MAC address is quite deadly with mac80211, ath9k and 802.11 block ack. It fails ieee80211_find_sta_by_ifaddr in ath9k (xmit.c). Ath9k flushes tx queue (ath_tx_complete_aggr). BAW (block ack window) is not updated. BAW logic is damaged and ath9k transmission is disabled. Signed-off-by: Tong Zhu <zhutong@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <sashal@xxxxxxxxxx> diff --git a/net/core/neighbour.c b/net/core/neighbour.c index 40d33431bc58..17997902d316 100644 --- a/net/core/neighbour.c +++ b/net/core/neighbour.c @@ -1234,7 +1234,7 @@ int neigh_update(struct neighbour *neigh, const u8 *lladdr, u8 new, * we can reinject the packet there. */ n2 = NULL; - if (dst) { + if (dst && dst->obsolete != DST_OBSOLETE_DEAD) { n2 = dst_neigh_lookup_skb(dst, skb); if (n2) n1 = n2;