Re: [PATCH net-next] netfilter: nf_tables: avoid excessive stack usage

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 8:07 PM Pablo Neira Ayuso <pablo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi Arnd,
>
> On Fri, Sep 06, 2019 at 05:12:30PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > The nft_offload_ctx structure is much too large to put on the
> > stack:
> >
> > net/netfilter/nf_tables_offload.c:31:23: error: stack frame size of 1200 bytes in function 'nft_flow_rule_create' [-Werror,-Wframe-larger-than=]
> >
> > Use dynamic allocation here, as we do elsewhere in the same
> > function.
> >
> > Fixes: c9626a2cbdb2 ("netfilter: nf_tables: add hardware offload support")
> > Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx>
> > ---
> > Since we only really care about two members of the structure, an
> > alternative would be a larger rewrite, but that is probably too
> > late for v5.4.
>
> Thanks for this patch.
>
> I'm attaching a patch to reduce this structure size a bit. Do you
> think this alternative patch is ok until this alternative rewrite
> happens?

I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like that would save 8 of the
48 bytes in each for each of the 24 registers (12 bytes on m68k
or i386, which only use 4 byte alignment for nft_data), so
this wouldn't make too much difference.

> Anyway I agree we should to get this structure away from the
> stack, even after this is still large, so your patch (or a variant of
> it) will be useful sooner than later I think.

What I was thinking for a possible smaller fix would be to not
pass the ctx into the expr->ops->offload callback but
only pass the 'dep' member. Since I've never seen this code
before, I have no idea if that would be an improvement
in the end.

       Arnd