CVE-2026-43194

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

net: consume xmit errors of GSO frames

udpgro_frglist.sh and udpgro_bench.sh are the flakiest tests currently in NIPA. They fail in the same exact way, TCP GRO test stalls occasionally and the test gets killed after 10min.

These tests use veth to simulate GRO. They attach a trivial ("return XDP_PASS;") XDP program to the veth to force TSO off and NAPI on.

Digging into the failure mode we can see that the connection is completely stuck after a burst of drops. The sender's snd_nxt is at sequence number N [1], but the receiver claims to have received (rcv_nxt) up to N + 3 * MSS [2]. Last piece of the puzzle is that senders rtx queue is not empty (let's say the block in the rtx queue is at sequence number N - 4 * MSS [3]).

In this state, sender sends a retransmission from the rtx queue with a single segment, and sequence numbers N-4MSS:N-3MSS [3]. Receiver sees it and responds with an ACK all the way up to N + 3 * MSS [2]. But sender will reject this ack as TCP_ACK_UNSENT_DATA because it has no recollection of ever sending data that far out [1]. And we are stuck.

The root cause is the mess of the xmit return codes. veth returns an error when it can't xmit a frame. We end up with a loss event like this:

| GSO super frame 1 | GSO super frame 2 | |-----------------------------------------------| | seg | seg | seg | seg | seg | seg | seg | seg | | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |

 x    ok    ok    <ok>|  ok    ok    ok   <x>
                      \\
		   snd_nxt

"x" means packet lost by veth, and "ok" means it went thru. Since veth has TSO disabled in this test it sees individual segments. Segment 1 is on the retransmit queue and will be resent.

So why did the sender not advance snd_nxt even tho it clearly did send up to seg 8? tcp_write_xmit()...