ipv4: Return -ENETUNREACH if we cant create route but saddr is valid ...instead of -EINVAL. An issue was found with older kernel versions while unplugging a NFS client with pending RPCs, and the wrong error code here prevented it from recovering once link is back up with a configured address. Incidentally, this is not an issue anymore since commit 4f8943f80883 ("SUNRPC: Replace direct task wakeups from softirq context"), included in 5.2-rc7, had the effect of decoupling the forwarding of this error by using SO_ERROR in xs_wake_error(), as pointed out by Benjamin Coddington. To the best of my knowledge, this isn't currently causing any further issue, but the error code doesn't look appropriate anyway, and we might hit this in other paths as well. In detail, as analysed by Gonzalo Siero, once the route is deleted because the interface is down, and can't be resolved and we return -EINVAL here, this ends up, courtesy of inet_sk_rebuild_header(), as the socket error seen by tcp_write_err(), called by tcp_retransmit_timer(). In turn, tcp_write_err() indirectly calls xs_error_report(), which wakes up the RPC pending tasks with a status of -EINVAL. This is then seen by call_status() in the SUN RPC implementation, which aborts the RPC call calling rpc_exit(), instead of handling this as a potentially temporary condition, i.e. as a timeout. Return -EINVAL only if the input parameters passed to ip_route_output_key_hash_rcu() are actually invalid (this is the case if the specified source address is multicast, limited broadcast or all zeroes), but return -ENETUNREACH in all cases where, at the given moment, the given source address doesn't allow resolving the route. While at it, drop the initialisation of err to -ENETUNREACH, which was added to __ip_route_output_key() back then by commit 0315e3827048 ("net: Fix behaviour of unreachable, blackhole and prohibit routes"), but actually had no effect, as it was, and is, overwritten by the fib_lookup() return code assignment, and anyway ignored in all other branches, including the if (fl4->saddr) one: I find this rather confusing, as it would look like -ENETUNREACH is the "default" error, while that statement has no effect. Also note that after commit fc75fc8339e7 ("ipv4: dont create routes on down devices"), we would get -ENETUNREACH if the device is down, but -EINVAL if the source address is specified and we can't resolve the route, and this appears to be rather inconsistent. Reported-by: Stefan Walter Analysed-by: Benjamin Coddington Analysed-by: Gonzalo Siero Signed-off-by: Stefano Brivio Signed-off-by: David S. Miller Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman --- net/ipv4/route.c | 9 ++++++--- 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) --- a/net/ipv4/route.c +++ b/net/ipv4/route.c @@ -2381,14 +2381,17 @@ struct rtable *ip_route_output_key_hash_ int orig_oif = fl4->flowi4_oif; unsigned int flags = 0; struct rtable *rth; - int err = -ENETUNREACH; + int err; if (fl4->saddr) { - rth = ERR_PTR(-EINVAL); if (ipv4_is_multicast(fl4->saddr) || ipv4_is_lbcast(fl4->saddr) || - ipv4_is_zeronet(fl4->saddr)) + ipv4_is_zeronet(fl4->saddr)) { + rth = ERR_PTR(-EINVAL); goto out; + } + + rth = ERR_PTR(-ENETUNREACH); /* I removed check for oif == dev_out->oif here. It was wrong for two reasons: