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 fdd7b4c3302c93f6833e338903ea77245eb510b4.  A
long time prior to that however, Francois posted
126fa4b9ca5d9d7cb7d46f779ad3bd3631ca387c, 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>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions