Re: r8152: data corruption in various scenarios

[Mark Lord <mlord@pobox.com>]

On 2019-01-05 9:14 a.m., Mark Lord wrote:
> A couple of years back, I reported data corruption resulting from
> a change in kernel 3.16 which enabled hardware checksums in the r8152 driver.
> This was happening on an embedded system that was using a r8152 USB dongle.
> 
> At the time, it was very difficult to figure out what could possibly be causing it,
> other than that re-enabling software checksums prevented corrupted packets from
> resulting in more serious issues.
> 
> Since that time, more and more reports of similar corruption and issues
> have been trickling in.  Eg.
> 
>    https://lore.kernel.org/patchwork/patch/873920/

Forgot to include this link (below) where people still have the issue
even with the driver workaround.  Switching to software checksums "fixes" it:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1460789

> 
> Note that there are reports in the thread above that the issues
> are not limited to only the built-in ethernet chip of the dock.
> 
> There is even now a special hack in the upstream r8152.c to attempt to detect
> a Dell TB16 dock and disable RX Aggregation in the driver to prevent such issues.
> 
> Well.. I have a WD15 dock, not a TB16, and that same hack also catches my dock
> in its net:
> 
>     [5.794641] usb 4-1.2: Dell TB16 Dock, disable RX aggregation
> 
> So one issue is that the code is not correctly identifying the dock,
> and the WD15 is claimed to be immune from the r8152 issues.
> 
> One of the symptoms of the r8152 issue, reported by Ansis Atteka,
> were messages like this:
> 
>    xhci_hcd 0000:39:00.0: ERROR Transfer event TRB DMA ptr not part of current TD ep_index 13
> comp_code 1
> 
> I just got that exact message above, with the r8152 in my 1-day old WD15 dock,
> with the TB16 "workaround" enabled in Linux kernel 4.20.0.
> 
>>From this I conclude that the workaround is not 100% complete yet.
> 


-- 
Mark Lord
Real-Time Remedies Inc.
mlord@pobox.com