In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: gve: fix Rx queue stall on alloc failure When the system is under extreme memory pressure, page allocations can fail during the Rx buffer refill loop. If the number of buffers posted to hardware falls below a critical low threshold and the refill loop exits due to allocation failures, the queue can stall: 1. The device drops incoming packets because there are no descriptors. 2. Since no packets are processed, no Rx completions are generated. 3. Because no completions occur, NAPI is never scheduled, preventing the refill loop from running again even after memory is freed. This results in a permanent queue stall. Resolve this by introducing a starvation recovery timer for each Rx queue. If the number of buffers posted to hardware falls below a critical low threshold, start a timer to periodically reschedule NAPI. Once NAPI runs and successfully refills the queue above the threshold, the timer is not rescheduled. The threshold is set to 32 because a single maximum-sized Receive Segment Coalescing (RSC) packet can consume up to 19 descriptors in the Rx path. Lower thresholds (such as 8 or 16) would be insufficient to process a complete maximum-sized RSC packet, risking packet drops or unexpected hardware behavior under memory pressure. Setting the threshold to 32 guarantees a safe margin to handle at least one full RSC packet.
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b65352a1bac64442ad95e64f385b40ccb9f1b0db
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/91e0249f3ef62b75fe8c9c9372eaba32876e4b3a
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/689b9f588d2d7323dc66293fe594a68d030f400f
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/299d5728a7312fdd02059b074aebbe4ebbd391e4
https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0c317349b4baa5038d1fc373bf46d5a2419d1710