Re: [PATCH v3 2/2] virtio_net: notify MAC address change on device initialization

From: Laurent Vivier
Date: Tue Jan 31 2023 - 04:33:45 EST


On 1/31/23 10:01, Paolo Abeni wrote:
On Fri, 2023-01-27 at 21:45 +0100, Laurent Vivier wrote:
In virtnet_probe(), if the device doesn't provide a MAC address the
driver assigns a random one.
As we modify the MAC address we need to notify the device to allow it
to update all the related information.

The problem can be seen with vDPA and mlx5_vdpa driver as it doesn't
assign a MAC address by default. The virtio_net device uses a random
MAC address (we can see it with "ip link"), but we can't ping a net
namespace from another one using the virtio-vdpa device because the
new MAC address has not been provided to the hardware:
RX packets are dropped since they don't go through the receive filters,
TX packets go through unaffected.

Signed-off-by: Laurent Vivier <lvivier@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
drivers/net/virtio_net.c | 20 ++++++++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 20 insertions(+)

diff --git a/drivers/net/virtio_net.c b/drivers/net/virtio_net.c
index 7d700f8e545a..704a05f1c279 100644
--- a/drivers/net/virtio_net.c
+++ b/drivers/net/virtio_net.c
@@ -3806,6 +3806,8 @@ static int virtnet_probe(struct virtio_device *vdev)
eth_hw_addr_set(dev, addr);
} else {
eth_hw_addr_random(dev);
+ dev_info(&vdev->dev, "Assigned random MAC address %pM\n",
+ dev->dev_addr);
}
/* Set up our device-specific information */
@@ -3933,6 +3935,24 @@ static int virtnet_probe(struct virtio_device *vdev)
virtio_device_ready(vdev);
+ /* a random MAC address has been assigned, notify the device.
+ * We don't fail probe if VIRTIO_NET_F_CTRL_MAC_ADDR is not there
+ * because many devices work fine without getting MAC explicitly
+ */
+ if (!virtio_has_feature(vdev, VIRTIO_NET_F_MAC) &&
+ virtio_has_feature(vi->vdev, VIRTIO_NET_F_CTRL_MAC_ADDR)) {
+ struct scatterlist sg;
+
+ sg_init_one(&sg, dev->dev_addr, dev->addr_len);
+ if (!virtnet_send_command(vi, VIRTIO_NET_CTRL_MAC,
+ VIRTIO_NET_CTRL_MAC_ADDR_SET, &sg)) {
+ pr_debug("virtio_net: setting MAC address failed\n");
+ rtnl_unlock();
+ err = -EINVAL;
+ goto free_unregister_netdev;

Since the above is still dealing with device initialization, would it
make sense moving such init step before registering the netdevice?

It depends if we can send the command using the control command queue or not.
I don't think we can use a vq before virtio_device_ready().

Thanks,
Laurent