need info: softirq warning upon free skb

From: Arend van Spriel
Date: Thu Mar 14 2013 - 14:51:35 EST


Hi Dave,

Sorry to bother. Today during testing I ran into two warnings, which given their occurrence are fired in the same code path:
kernel/softirq.c:99:__local_bh_disable():
WARN_ON_ONCE(in_irq());
kernel/softirq.c:160:_local_bh_enable_ip():
WARN_ON_ONCE(in_irq() || irqs_disabled());

I have not seen those warning before, but consider them serious enough to look into it (although no crashing system yet). They popped up in our driver while freeing an skb. For this we use a utility function in our driver (brcm80211 wireless) as listed below. It provided a little code shortcut by skipping dev_kfree_skb_any(). However, circumstances seem to have changed for some reason. The warning occurs in nf_conntrack_destroy() path. Before digging deeper I decided the answer might be known out there. Should the comment statements in the code snippet below still be valid? I am more than happy to get rid of the function entirely if it does not make sense.

Regards,
Arend

-8<---------------------------------------------------------------
void brcmu_pkt_buf_free_skb(struct sk_buff *skb)
{
if (!skb)
return;
WARN_ON(skb->next);
if (skb->destructor)
/* cannot kfree_skb() on hard IRQ (net/core/skbuff.c) if
* destructor exists
*/
dev_kfree_skb_any(skb);
else
/* can free immediately (even in_irq()) if destructor
* does not exist
*/
dev_kfree_skb(skb);
}

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