Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 1/2] Ignore RX tail kicks when RX disabled.

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 08:31:46PM +0200, Dmitry Fleytman wrote:
> Device RX initization from driver's side consists of following steps:
>   1. Initialize head and tail of RX ring to 0
>   2. Enable Rx (set bit in RCTL register)
>   3. Allocate buffers, fill descriptors
>   4. Write ring tail
> 
> Forth operation signals hardware that RX buffers available
> and it may start packets indication.
> 
> Current implementation treats first operation (write 0 to ring tail)
> as signal of buffers availability and starts data transfers as soon
> as RX enable indicaton arrives.
> 
> This is not correct because there is a chance that ring is still
> empty (third action not performed yet) and then memory corruption
> occures.

The existing code tries to prevent this:

e1000_receive(NetClientState *nc, const uint8_t *buf, size_t size)
{
    [...]

    if (!(s->mac_reg[RCTL] & E1000_RCTL_EN))
        return -1;

    [...]
    total_size = size + fcs_len(s);
    if (!e1000_has_rxbufs(s, total_size)) {
            set_ics(s, 0, E1000_ICS_RXO);
            return -1;
    }

Why are these checks not enough?

Which memory gets corrupted?

Stefan