[PATCH 0/4] net: airoha: fix silent RX packet loss on ring 4

Vitaliy Sochnev sochnev.v.74 at gmail.com
Sun Aug 30 02:57:13 PDT 2026


This series fixes silent RX packet loss on the airoha_eth driver that
shows up as PPPoE/DHCP negotiation randomly failing to complete
(reported and reproduced on Nokia XG-040G-MF, AN7583). Two independent
causes were found on the same ring - ring 4, the shared "force to CPU"
ring that several unrelated control protocols get routed onto - so
they're posted together for context even though patch 1 targets net
and patches 2-4 target net-next:

  1/4 (net):      RX_NO_CPU_DSCP interrupt was unmasked but never
                   handled, so a ring drained to zero descriptors
                   never got NAPI rescheduled to refill it. Plain bug
                   fix, no new behavior beyond "stuck ring recovers".

  2/4 (net-next): a second, independent cause: hardware can complete
                   a descriptor past the software-posted boundary
                   before it's been reposted, wedging the strictly
                   sequential consumer forever even though real frames
                   are sitting further along in the ring. Detected via
                   comparing hw's own RX_DMA_IDX against the sw
                   consumer across polls, recovered via a deferred
                   ring resync. Marked net-next rather than net
                   because I can't currently offer a fresh
                   reproduction to back it up - see the patch itself
                   for what evidence it does rest on.

  3/4 (net-next): new ethtool -S counter for observing when 2/4's
                   recovery fires. New ABI, split out from the fix
                   itself, no correctness impact either way.

  4/4 (net-next): grow ring 4 from 16 to 128 descriptors, since the
                   race in 2/4 is correlated with this specific ring's
                   idle-to-first-frame burst pattern. On its own this
                   doesn't fix anything - it exists to make the race
                   in 2/4 harder to hit - so it only makes sense
                   alongside 2/4, hence net-next timing here too.

Some background on how these were found and tested, and answers to a
couple of questions I expect to come up, since they already did during
downstream review:

- All four were developed, build- and stress-tested against a 6.18
  base as part of an OpenWrt PR (openwrt/openwrt#24872) before being
  rebased here against current net/net-next. 1/4 and 4/4 have real
  hardware evidence: 1/4 fixes a reproduced-on-hardware bug tracked at
  the issue linked in its commit; 4/4's 128-descriptor ring survived
  500+ forced PPPoE/DHCP reconnect cycles (~20h+) on real hardware with
  zero drops, both with and without 2/4 present.

- 2/4's race itself did not reproduce during ~57 combined hours of
  fresh stress-testing this round (with and without the fix present,
  same test methodology as above) - its rx_stall_recover counter (3/4)
  never incremented once. The case for 2/4 rests on earlier, less
  controlled field/downstream testing that did point at this exact
  race, not on a fresh trigger from this round. I'm not confident
  enough in that to call it a `net` fix, hence net-next.

- 2/4 and 1/4 each carry an open question in their commit messages
  (an MMIO-read cost on the RX hot path for 2/4, an interrupt-storm
  question for 1/4) that came up during the downstream review -
  answered inline there rather than left for a first pass here.

Vitaliy Sochnev (4):
  net: airoha: handle RX_NO_CPU_DSCP interrupt, not just RX_DONE
  net: airoha: recover RX ring after hw completion race
  net: airoha: add rx_stall_recover ethtool counter
  net: airoha: grow RX ring 4 to 128 descriptors

 drivers/net/ethernet/airoha/airoha_eth.c | 207 ++++++++++++++++++++++-
 drivers/net/ethernet/airoha/airoha_eth.h |  22 +++
 2 files changed, 223 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)

-- 
2.55.0




More information about the linux-arm-kernel mailing list