[PATCH AUTOSEL 6.18-5.10] net: stmmac: xgmac2: disable RBUE in default RX interrupt mask
Sasha Levin
sashal at kernel.org
Mon Aug 31 06:23:58 PDT 2026
From: Nazim Amirul <muhammad.nazim.amirul.nazle.asmade at altera.com>
[ Upstream commit d3265c19b35d036bba327b36b5366bee76b0157c ]
Enabling the RX Buffer Unavailable (RBUE) interrupt is counterproductive
and can trigger a MAC interrupt storm under heavy RX pressure. When the
DMA runs out of RX descriptors it fires RBUE continuously until software
refills the ring.
However, RBUE is redundant: the normal RX completion interrupt (RIE)
already triggers NAPI, which processes completed descriptors and refills
the ring, causing the DMA to resume. The RBUE handler itself only sets
handle_rx - the same outcome as RIE.
On Agilex5 under heavy RX pressure, the MAC interrupt (which includes
RBUE) was observed firing 1,821,811,555 times against only 2,618,627
actual RX completions - a ~695x ratio - confirming the severity of the
storm.
RBUE does not provide OOM recovery. If page_pool is exhausted,
stmmac_rx_refill() cannot advance the DMA tail pointer, the DMA stays
suspended, and RBUE fires again on the next NAPI completion - a storm
with no forward progress. This patch trades that storm for a clean
stall with the same RX outcome. Proper OOM recovery is a pre-existing
gap outside the scope of this fix.
Note: as a consequence of disabling RBUE, the rx_buf_unav_irq ethtool
counter will always read 0 on XGMAC2 devices. This behaviour is already
inconsistent across DWMAC core versions.
Remove RBUE from XGMAC_DMA_INT_DEFAULT_EN and XGMAC_DMA_INT_DEFAULT_RX
to prevent the interrupt storm while keeping normal RX handling intact.
Reviewed-by: Maxime Chevallier <maxime.chevallier at bootlin.com>
Signed-off-by: Nazim Amirul <muhammad.nazim.amirul.nazle.asmade at altera.com>
Reviewed-by: Simon Horman <horms at kernel.org>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260609121703.9736-1-muhammad.nazim.amirul.nazle.asmade@altera.com
Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba at kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <sashal at kernel.org>
---
LLM Generated explanations, may be completely bogus:
Both background git searches finished successfully, but returned no
matches on the current `linux-6.18.y` checkout — expected, since the fix
isn’t in stable yet.
The commit was found on `master` as **`d3265c19b35d0`** (`net: stmmac:
xgmac2: disable RBUE in default RX interrupt mask`). That confirmed the
buggy RBUE masks are still present in 6.18.44 and the analysis
conclusion stands: **YES** for stable backport.
drivers/net/ethernet/stmicro/stmmac/dwxgmac2.h | 4 ++--
1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
diff --git a/drivers/net/ethernet/stmicro/stmmac/dwxgmac2.h b/drivers/net/ethernet/stmicro/stmmac/dwxgmac2.h
index 67e2d539c3385..301e5e8993e37 100644
--- a/drivers/net/ethernet/stmicro/stmmac/dwxgmac2.h
+++ b/drivers/net/ethernet/stmicro/stmmac/dwxgmac2.h
@@ -385,9 +385,9 @@
#define XGMAC_RIE BIT(6)
#define XGMAC_TBUE BIT(2)
#define XGMAC_TIE BIT(0)
-#define XGMAC_DMA_INT_DEFAULT_EN (XGMAC_NIE | XGMAC_AIE | XGMAC_RBUE | \
+#define XGMAC_DMA_INT_DEFAULT_EN (XGMAC_NIE | XGMAC_AIE | \
XGMAC_RIE | XGMAC_TIE)
-#define XGMAC_DMA_INT_DEFAULT_RX (XGMAC_RBUE | XGMAC_RIE)
+#define XGMAC_DMA_INT_DEFAULT_RX (XGMAC_RIE)
#define XGMAC_DMA_INT_DEFAULT_TX (XGMAC_TIE)
#define XGMAC_DMA_CH_Rx_WATCHDOG(x) (0x0000313c + (0x80 * (x)))
#define XGMAC_RWT GENMASK(7, 0)
--
2.53.0
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