Re: [PATCH net-next] bonding: Remove support for use_carrier = 0
From: Stanislav Fomichev <hidden>
Date: 2025-06-17 17:48:22
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On 06/16, Jay Vosburgh wrote:
Stanislav Fomichev [off-list ref] wrote:quoted
On 06/16, Jay Vosburgh wrote:quoted
Remove the ability to disable use_carrier in bonding, and remove all code related to the old link state check that utilizes ethtool or ioctl to determine the link state of an interface in a bond. To avoid acquiring RTNL many times per second, bonding's miimon link monitor inspects link state under RCU, but not under RTNL. However, ethtool implementations in drivers may sleep, and therefore the ethtool or ioctl strategy is unsuitable for use with calls into driver ethtool functions. The use_carrier option was introduced in 2003, to provide backwards compatibility for network device drivers that did not support the then-new netif_carrier_ok/on/off system. Today, device drivers are expected to support netif_carrier_*, and the use_carrier backwards compatibility logic is no longer necessary. Bonding now always behaves as if use_carrier=1, which relies on netif_carrier_ok() to determine the link state of interfaces. This has been the default setting for use_carrier since its introduction. For backwards compatibility, the option itself remains, but may only be set to 1, and queries will always return 1. Reported-by: syzbot+b8c48ea38ca27d150063@syzkaller.appspotmail.com Closes: https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?extid=b8c48ea38ca27d150063 Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/000000000000eb54bf061cfd666a@google.com/ (local) Link: https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/20240718122017.d2e33aaac43a.I10ab9c9ded97163aef4e4de10985cd8f7de60d28@changeid/ (local) Link: http://lore.kernel.org/netdev/aEt6LvBMwUMxmUyx@mini-arch (local) Signed-off-by: Jay Vosburgh <jv@jvosburgh.net>Acked-by: Stanislav Fomichev <sdf@fomichev.me> Maybe better to target 'net' with the following? Fixes: f7a11cba0ed7 ("bonding: hold ops lock around get_link")I targeted net-next and left the Fixes: tag off on purpose. First, the bug this nominally fixes is many years old, and wasn't introduced by f7a11cba0ed7. More importantly, though, this patch is removing functionality that someone theoretically could be relying on, and I don't think such removals should happen in the middle of a stable series. The default setting for use_carrier (i.e., using netif_carrier) will never hit the issue in practice, so the exposure seems to be minimal for common use.
SG, especially assuming that use_carrier has a default of 1 (so the issue should not appear in most/default setups).