Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:41:07 +0100 | From | Bruno Prémont <> | Subject | netlink: 12 bytes leftover after parsing attributes - triggered by iproute2 libnetlink's rtnl_dump_request() |
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Hi,
Starting with 3.3 when using collectd's netlink plugin to monitor interface stattistics I'm seeing 3 lines of complaint in kernel log per monitoring loop (10s interval)
[64951.027953] netlink: 12 bytes leftover after parsing attributes.
It seems link the message is generated for each network interface on the system.
The same userspace code running on 3.2 does not produce the lines in kernel log.
Basic source code to reproduce (netlink subset of collectd's netlink plugin): #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> #include <sys/socket.h> #include <linux/netlink.h> #include <linux/rtnetlink.h> #include <libnetlink.h>
int link_filter (const struct sockaddr_nl *sa, struct nlmsghdr *nmh, void *args) { return 0; }
int main(int argc, char **argv) { struct rtnl_handle rth; struct ifinfomsg im; struct tcmsg tm;
memset(&rth, 0, sizeof(rth)); rtnl_open(&rth, 0); memset(&im, 0, sizeof(im)); im.ifi_type = AF_UNSPEC;
rtnl_dump_request(&rth, RTM_GETLINK, &im, sizeof(im)); rtnl_dump_filter(&rth, link_filter, NULL, NULL, NULL); rtnl_close(&rth); return 0; }
Compile with $CC -o test test.c -lnetlink (here using libnetlink.a from iproute2-2.6.38)
Strace of test code shows the following: sendmsg(3, {msg_name(12)={sa_family=AF_NETLINK, pid=0, groups=00000000}, msg_iov(2)=[{" \0\0\0\22\0\1\3\272[hO\0\0\0\0", 16}, {"\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0", 16}], msg_controllen=0, msg_flags=0}, 0) = 32 recvmsg(3, {msg_name(12)={sa_family=AF_NETLINK, pid=0, groups=00000000}, msg_iov(1)=[{..., 16384}], msg_controllen=0, msg_flags=0}, 0) = 2980 recvmsg(3, {msg_name(12)={sa_family=AF_NETLINK, pid=0, groups=00000000}, msg_iov(1)=[{..., 16384}], msg_controllen=0, msg_flags=0}, 0) = 20
Note: when omitting the rtnl_dump_filter() call only two lines appear in kernel log.
Comparing to iproute2 call (ip -s link list) which does not trigger the same message in kernel log I have: send(3, "\24\0\0\0\22\0\1\3\225]hO\0\0\0\0\21\0\0\0", 20, 0) = 20 recvmsg(3, {msg_name(12)={sa_family=AF_NETLINK, pid=0, groups=00000000}, msg_iov(1)=[{..., 16384}], msg_controllen=0, msg_flags=0}, 0) = 2980 recvmsg(3, {msg_name(12)={sa_family=AF_NETLINK, pid=0, groups=00000000}, msg_iov(1)=[{..., 16384}], msg_controllen=0, msg_flags=0}, 0) = 20
Looking at kernel history related to net/netlink I've seen the following commit which introduced the warning (or rather started using kernel's nla_parse() function in this path - and that function complains):
commit 115c9b81928360d769a76c632bae62d15206a94a Author: Greg Rose <gregory.v.rose@intel.com> Date: Tue Feb 21 16:54:48 2012 -0500
rtnetlink: Fix problem with buffer allocation Implement a new netlink attribute type IFLA_EXT_MASK. The mask is a 32 bit value that can be used to indicate to the kernel that certain extended ifinfo values are requested by the user application. At this time the only mask value defined is RTEXT_FILTER_VF to indicate that the user wants the ifinfo dump to send information about the VFs belonging to the interface. This patch fixes a bug in which certain applications do not have large enough buffers to accommodate the extra information returned by the kernel with large numbers of SR-IOV virtual functions. Those applications will not send the new netlink attribute with the interface info dump request netlink messages so they will not get unexpectedly large request buffers returned by the kernel. Modifies the rtnl_calcit function to traverse the list of net devices and compute the minimum buffer size that can hold the info dumps of all matching devices based upon the filter passed in via the new netlink attribute filter mask. If no filter mask is sent then the buffer allocation defaults to NLMSG_GOODSIZE. With this change it is possible to add yet to be defined netlink attributes to the dump request which should make it fairly extensible in the future.
A kernel at preceding commit 84338a6c9dbb6ff3de4749864020f8f25d86fc81 (neighbour: Fixed race condition at tbl->nht) does not show the log message, starting with that commit the message appears.
Should this get fixed at kernel level, iproute2 libnetlink level or at end-user level (e.g. collectd)? Three lines every 10 seconds is a damn lot!
Thanks, Bruno
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