On 12/8/25 1:27 PM, Odintsov Vladislav wrote:
On 08.12.2025 15:06, Rukomoinikova Aleksandra wrote:
Hi!
I was testing conntrack limiting using Open vSwitch and noticed the
following issue: under certain limits, a CPU lock occurred.
[ 491.682936] watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#1 stuck for 26s! [ovs-
dpctl:19437]
This occurs during a high packet frequency when trying to get the set
limits through ovs-dpctl ct-get-limits.
In the trace, I can see that the lock occurred on attempts to acquire a
spinlock.
[ 491.683056] <IRQ>
[ 491.683059] _raw_spin_lock_bh+0x29/0x30
[ 491.683064] count_tree+0x19b/0x1f0 [nf_conncount]
[ 491.683069] ovs_ct_commit+0x196/0x490 [openvswitch]
Prior to this, in the trace, there was processing of a task from
userspace (ovs-dpctl)
[ 491.683236] </IRQ>
[ 491.683237] <TASK>
[ 491.683238] asm_common_interrupt+0x22/0x40
[ 491.683240] RIP: 0010:nf_conncount_gc_list+0x18a/0x200 [nf_conncount]
Inside the nf_conncount_gc_list function, a lock is taken on
nf_conncount.c:spin_trylock_bh(&list->list_lock):335. After this, the
not-so-fast __nf_conncount_gc_list function is executed. If, at this
moment, a packet interrupt arrives on the same сpu core (and
spin_trylock_bh doesn't disable interrupts on that core), then scenario
I encountered occurs: the first lock remains held, while the packet
interrupt also attempts to acquire it at
nf_conncount.c:spin_lock_bh(&rbconn->list.list_lock):502 while
committing to conntrack. This attempt fails, leading to a soft lockup.
Yes that makes sense. That nf_conncount_gc_list() was added there to
cover a different scenario which might be also affected by this soft
lockup under the same conditions.
Hence my question: shouldn't we avoid calling nf_conncount_gc_list when
querying limits without an skb (as OVS does in openvswitch/
conntrack.c:1773)? The limit retrieval operation should be read-only
regarding the contract state, not involve potential modification.
Like this:
--- a/net/netfilter/nf_conncount.c
+++ b/net/netfilter/nf_conncount.c
@@ -495,7 +495,6 @@ count_tree(struct net *net,
int ret;
if (!skb) {
- nf_conncount_gc_list(net, &rbconn->list);
return rbconn->list.count;
}
Let me think on something, I would like to provide a solution that is
suitable for OVS + xt/nft_connlimit. Because this change would break
some xt_connlimit use-cases. Also without this nf_conncount_gc_list(),
the connection count wouldn't be accurate.. if some connections closed
already the count number would still consider them..
Thanks for reporting it, I will let you know my findings on how to solve
this :-)
Thanks,
Fernando.
Thanks!
--
regards,
Alexandra.
+ ovs-dev ML
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