It was noticed that APs stopped to accept clients after a while. With QCA's ath11k fork, it even printed some additional information:
attach ack fail -28
when new clients tried to connect. hostapd was then usually showing a message like "deauthenticated due to inactivity (timer DEAUTH/REMOVE)".
While debugging this, it was noticed that this happened when a peer was no longer known by ath11k but an NL80211_CMD_PROBE_CLIENT triggered TX was just "finished" for it. In that case, ath11k was just throwing the skb away and left some information in various data structures in mac80211.
And after Felix pointed out ieee80211_free_txskb(), it is also clear that dev_kfree_skb_any() in these functions should also be calls to ieee80211_free_txskb() - but for these, I have nothing to trigger this error case. Still, a patch is provided as part of this patch series.
Signed-off-by: Sven Eckelmann sven@narfation.org --- Changes in v2: - Simply switch to ieee80211_free_txskb() as recommended by Felix Fietkau
+ ieee80211_free_txskb calls ieee80211_report_used_skb + ieee80211_report_used_skb calls ieee80211_report_ack_skb (when ack_frame_id is set and !IEEE80211_TX_INTFL_MLME_CONN_TX) + ieee80211_report_ack_skb will remove skb from ack_status_frames
- Add second patch which handles similar situations in the previously patched functions - Link to v1: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230801-ath11k-ack_status_leak-v1-1-539cb72c55bc@...
--- Sven Eckelmann (2): ath11k: Don't drop tx_status when peer cannot be found ath11k: Cleanup mac80211 references on failure during tx_complete
drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath11k/dp_tx.c | 10 +++++----- 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) --- base-commit: 1d7dd5aa35474e553b8671b58579e0749b560779 change-id: 20230801-ath11k-ack_status_leak-70a7a30e5d9f
Best regards,