This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled e1000e: fix race condition around skb_tstamp_tx() to the 3.18-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: e1000e-fix-race-condition-around-skb_tstamp_tx.patch and it can be found in the queue-3.18 subdirectory. If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree, please let <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> know about it. >From foo@baz Tue Apr 10 13:58:07 CEST 2018 From: Jacob Keller <jacob.e.keller@xxxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 3 May 2017 10:28:50 -0700 Subject: e1000e: fix race condition around skb_tstamp_tx() From: Jacob Keller <jacob.e.keller@xxxxxxxxx> [ Upstream commit 5012863b7347866764c4a4e58b62fb05346b0d06 ] The e1000e driver and related hardware has a limitation on Tx PTP packets which requires we limit to timestamping a single packet at once. We do this by verifying that we never request a new Tx timestamp while we still have a tx_hwtstamp_skb pointer. Unfortunately the driver suffers from a race condition around this. The tx_hwtstamp_skb pointer is not set to NULL until after skb_tstamp_tx() is called. This function notifies the stack and applications of a new timestamp. Even a well behaved application that only sends a new request when the first one is finished might be woken up and possibly send a packet before we can free the timestamp in the driver again. The result is that we needlessly ignore some Tx timestamp requests in this corner case. Fix this by assigning the tx_hwtstamp_skb pointer prior to calling skb_tstamp_tx() and use a temporary pointer to hold the timestamped skb until that function finishes. This ensures that the application is not woken up until the driver is ready to begin timestamping a new packet. This ensures that well behaved applications do not accidentally race with condition to skip Tx timestamps. Obviously an application which sends multiple Tx timestamp requests at once will still only timestamp one packet at a time. Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about this. Reported-by: David Mirabito <davidm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Jacob Keller <jacob.e.keller@xxxxxxxxx> Tested-by: Aaron Brown <aaron.f.brown@xxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Jeff Kirsher <jeffrey.t.kirsher@xxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <alexander.levin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- drivers/net/ethernet/intel/e1000e/netdev.c | 10 ++++++++-- 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) --- a/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/e1000e/netdev.c +++ b/drivers/net/ethernet/intel/e1000e/netdev.c @@ -1181,6 +1181,7 @@ static void e1000e_tx_hwtstamp_work(stru struct e1000_hw *hw = &adapter->hw; if (er32(TSYNCTXCTL) & E1000_TSYNCTXCTL_VALID) { + struct sk_buff *skb = adapter->tx_hwtstamp_skb; struct skb_shared_hwtstamps shhwtstamps; u64 txstmp; @@ -1189,9 +1190,14 @@ static void e1000e_tx_hwtstamp_work(stru e1000e_systim_to_hwtstamp(adapter, &shhwtstamps, txstmp); - skb_tstamp_tx(adapter->tx_hwtstamp_skb, &shhwtstamps); - dev_kfree_skb_any(adapter->tx_hwtstamp_skb); + /* Clear the global tx_hwtstamp_skb pointer and force writes + * prior to notifying the stack of a Tx timestamp. + */ adapter->tx_hwtstamp_skb = NULL; + wmb(); /* force write prior to skb_tstamp_tx */ + + skb_tstamp_tx(skb, &shhwtstamps); + dev_kfree_skb_any(skb); } else if (time_after(jiffies, adapter->tx_hwtstamp_start + adapter->tx_timeout_factor * HZ)) { dev_kfree_skb_any(adapter->tx_hwtstamp_skb); Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from jacob.e.keller@xxxxxxxxx are queue-3.18/e1000e-fix-race-condition-around-skb_tstamp_tx.patch