m_move_pkthdr leaves m_nextpkt 'dangling'

[Karim Fodil-Lemelin]

Hi,

As many of you know, when dealing with IP fragments the kernel will 
build a list of packets (fragments) chained together through the 
m_nextpkt pointer. This is all good until someone tries to do a 
M_PREPEND on one of the packet in the chain and the M_PREPEND has to 
create an extra mbuf to prepend at the beginning of the chain.

When doing so m_move_pkthdr is called to copy the current PKTHDR fields 
(tags and flags) to the mbuf that was prepended. The function also does:

to->m_pkthdr = from->m_pkthdr;

This, for the case I am interested in, essentially leaves the 'from' 
mbuf with a dangling pointer m_nextpkt pointing to the next fragment. 
While this is mostly harmless because only mbufs of pkthdr types are 
supposed to have m_nextpkt it triggers some panics when running with 
INVARIANTS in NetGraph (see ng_base.c :: CHECK_DATA_MBUF(m)):

...
                         if (n->m_nextpkt != NULL)                       \
                                 panic("%s: m_nextpkt", __func__);       \
                 }
...

So I would like to propose the following patch:

@@ -442,10 +442,11 @@ m_move_pkthdr(struct mbuf *to, struct mbuf *from)
         if ((to->m_flags & M_EXT) == 0)
                 to->m_data = to->m_pktdat;
         to->m_pkthdr = from->m_pkthdr;          /* especially tags */
         SLIST_INIT(&from->m_pkthdr.tags);       /* purge tags from src */
         from->m_flags &= ~M_PKTHDR;
+       from->m_nextpkt = NULL;
  }

It will reset the m_nextpkt so we don't have two mbufs pointing to the 
same next packet. This is fairly harmless and solves a problem for us 
here at XipLink.

Best regards,

Karim.