Re: ipv4/tcp.c:4234:1: error: the frame size of 1152 bytes is larger than 1024 bytes [-Werror=frame-larger-than=]

[Johannes Berg]

On Tue, 2021-09-07 at 16:14 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> The mac802.11 one seems to be due to 'struct ieee802_11_elems' being
> big, and allocated on the stack. I think it's probably made worse
> there with inlining, ie
> 
>  - ieee80211_sta_rx_queued_mgmt() has one copy
> 
>  - ieee80211_rx_mgmt_beacon() is possibly inlined, and has its own copy
> 
> but even if it isn't due to that kind of duplication due to inlining,
> that code is dangerous. Exactly because it has two nested stack frames
> with that big structure, and they are active at the same time in the
> callchain whether inlined or not.
> 
> And it's *pointlessly* dangerous, because the 'struct ieee802_11_elems
> elems' in ieee80211_sta_rx_queued_mgmt() is only used for the
> IEEE80211_STYPE_ACTION case, so it is entirely disjoint from the
> IEEE80211_STYPE_BEACON case, and those stack allocations simply should
> not nest like that in the first place.
> 
> Making the IEEE80211_STYPE_ACTION case be its own function - like the
> other cases - and moving the struct there should fix it. Possibly a
> "noinline" or two necessary to make sure that the compiler doesn't
> then undo the "these two cases are disjoint" thing.

Yeah, I'm aware, and I agree. We've been looking at it every now and
then. This got made worse by us actually adding a fair amount of
pointers to the struct recently (in this merge window).

Ultimately, every new spec addition ends up needing to add something
there, so I think ultimately we'll probably want to either dynamically
allocate it somewhere (perhaps in a data structure used here already),
or possibly not have this at all and just find a way to return only the
bits that are interesting. Even parsing a ~1k frame (typical, max ~2k) a
handful of times is probably not even worse than having this large a
structure that gets filled data that's probably useless in many cases (I
think the different cases all just need a subset). But not sure, I'll
take a look.

johannes