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  • Edward Allcutt's avatar
    ipv4: icmp: Fix pMTU handling for rare case · 68b7107b
    Edward Allcutt authored
    Some older router implementations still send Fragmentation Needed
    errors with the Next-Hop MTU field set to zero. This is explicitly
    described as an eventuality that hosts must deal with by the
    standard (RFC 1191) since older standards specified that those
    bits must be zero.
    
    Linux had a generic (for all of IPv4) implementation of the algorithm
    described in the RFC for searching a list of MTU plateaus for a good
    value. Commit 46517008 ("ipv4: Kill ip_rt_frag_needed().")
    removed this as part of the changes to remove the routing cache.
    Subsequently any Fragmentation Needed packet with a zero Next-Hop
    MTU has been discarded without being passed to the per-protocol
    handlers or notifying userspace for raw sockets.
    
    When there is a router which does not implement RFC 1191 on an
    MTU limited path then this results in stalled connections since
    large packets are discarded and the local protocols are not
    notified so they never attempt to lower the pMTU.
    
    One example I have seen is an OpenBSD router terminating IPSec
    tunnels. It's worth pointing out that this case is distinct from
    the BSD 4.2 bug which incorrectly calculated the Next-Hop MTU
    since the commit in question dismissed that as a valid concern.
    
    All of the per-protocols handlers implement the simple approach from
    RFC 1191 of immediately falling back to the minimum value. Although
    this is sub-optimal it is vastly preferable to connections hanging
    indefinitely.
    
    Remove the Next-Hop MTU != 0 check and allow such packets
    to follow the normal path.
    
    Fixes: 46517008
    
     ("ipv4: Kill ip_rt_frag_needed().")
    Signed-off-by: default avatarEdward Allcutt <edward.allcutt@openmarket.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
    68b7107b