• Sven Eckelmann's avatar
    batman-adv: Keep fragments equally sized · 628b27c3
    Sven Eckelmann authored
    commit 1c2bcc76 upstream.
    
    The batman-adv fragmentation packets have the design problem that they
    cannot be refragmented and cannot handle padding by the underlying link.
    The latter often leads to problems when networks are incorrectly configured
    and don't use a common MTU.
    
    The sender could for example fragment a 1271 byte frame (plus external
    ethernet header (14) and batadv unicast header (10)) to fit in a 1280 bytes
    large MTU of the underlying link (max. 1294 byte frames). This would create
    a 1294 bytes large frame (fragment 2) and a 55 bytes large frame
    (fragment 1). The extra 54 bytes are the fragment header (20) added to each
    fragment and the external ethernet header (14) for the second fragment.
    
    Let us assume that the next hop is then not able to transport 1294 bytes to
    its next hop. The 1294 byte large frame will be dropped but the 55 bytes
    large fragment will still be forwarded to its destination.
    
    Or let us assume that the underlying hardware requires that each frame has
    a minimum size (e.g. 60 bytes). Then it will pad the 55 bytes frame to 60
    bytes. The receiver of the 60 bytes frame will no longer be able to
    correctly assemble the two frames together because it is not aware that 5
    bytes of the 60 bytes frame are padding and don't belong to the reassembled
    frame.
    
    This can partly be avoided by splitting frames more equally. In this
    example, the 675 and 674 bytes large fragment frames could both potentially
    reach its destination without being too large or too small.
    Reported-by: default avatarMartin Weinelt <martin@darmstadt.freifunk.net>
    Fixes: ee75ed88 ("batman-adv: Fragment and send skbs larger than mtu")
    Signed-off-by: default avatarSven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>
    Acked-by: default avatarLinus Lüssing <linus.luessing@c0d3.blue>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarSimon Wunderlich <sw@simonwunderlich.de>
    [bwh: Backported to 3.16: adjust context]
    Signed-off-by: default avatarBen Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>
    628b27c3
fragmentation.c 14.9 KB