Hardware Infrastructure & Performance Optimization
The tale of a single register value

The tale of a single register value

11/3/2021 · Jakub Sitnicki

What this post added

This post details a deep dive into debugging a Linux kernel crash (kernel oops) in the ipv4 stack, triggered by a single network packet. It meticulously traces the crash to the `skb_gso_transport_seglen()` function, analyzing the assembly code and register values to pinpoint the cause: an invalid memory access when calculating the inner TCP header length for encapsulated packets. The investigation highlights the challenges of low-level kernel debugging and the importance of understanding packet structures and memory management in network stack operations.

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