r8169: offical fix for CVE-2009-4537 (overlength frame DMAs)
Official patch to fix the r8169 frame length check error. Based on this initial thread: http://marc.info/?l=linux-netdev&m=126202972828626&w=1 This is the official patch to fix the frame length problems in the r8169 driver. As noted in the previous thread, while this patch incurs a performance hit on the driver, its possible to improve performance dynamically by updating the mtu and rx_copybreak values at runtime to return performance to what it was for those NICS which are unaffected by the ideosyncracy (if there are any). Summary: A while back Eric submitted a patch for r8169 in which the proper allocated frame size was written to RXMaxSize to prevent the NIC from dmaing too much data. This was done in commit fdd7b4c3. A long time prior to that however, Francois posted 126fa4b9, which expiclitly disabled the MaxSize setting due to the fact that the hardware behaved in odd ways when overlong frames were received on NIC's supported by this driver. This was mentioned in a security conference recently: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/Fahrplan//events/3596.en.html It seems that if we can't enable frame size filtering, then, as Eric correctly noticed, we can find ourselves DMA-ing too much data to a buffer, causing corruption. As a result is seems that we are forced to allocate a frame which is ready to handle a maximally sized receive. This obviously has performance issues with it, so to mitigate that issue, this patch does two things: 1) Raises the copybreak value to the frame allocation size, which should force appropriately sized packets to get allocated on rx, rather than a full new 16k buffer. 2) This patch only disables frame filtering initially (i.e., during the NIC open), changing the MTU results in ring buffer allocation of a size in relation to the new mtu (along with a warning indicating that this is dangerous). Because of item (2), individuals who can't cope with the performance hit (or can otherwise filter frames to prevent the bug), or who have hardware they are sure is unaffected by this issue, can manually lower the copybreak and reset the mtu such that performance is restored easily. Signed-off-by: Neil Horman <nhorman@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
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