never disappearing neighbors with netlink arp
From: Timo Teräs <hidden>
Date: 2009-06-03 19:00:14
Hi, I found a very peculiar problem related to neighbor cache when using the netlink arp api. I never noticed this earlier until recently one of the nodes with a lot of traffic started getting "Neighbour table overflow" messages. I made my opennhrp daemon reply immediately with NUD_INVALID if the address is known to be unreachable which sounds like the proper thing to do. However, after some tedious reading of sources, it looks that: 1. Packet triggers new neighbor solicitation, entry goes to NUD_INCOMPLETE, the skb gets queued and based on my neightable config the first solicit is sent directly via netlink. 2. Userland receives and sends immediately back an update to NUD_INVALID. 3. Now it looks like net/core/neighbour.c:neigh_update() first checks for !(new & NUD_VALID), this matches and does the state transition, but the queued skb:s are not dequeued / error reported. Which leaves refs to the neigh entry. Now what happens after this is still a bit unclear to me, but it looks like the entry never gets garbage collected after this. I can probably workaround this from userland by just not replying at all for non-existent neighbors. But what would be the proper fix for this? It sounds bad if userland can flood never expiring entries to kernel. Would just a simple skb queue flush / error reporting be enough? Do we need to update time stamps too? Do something additional? Cheers, Timo