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HIGH

net: ethernet: cortina: Use TOE/TSO on all TCP

Published Jul 10, 2025

Description

It is desireable to push the hardware accelerator to also process non-segmented TCP frames: we pass the skb->len to the "TOE/TSO" offloader and it will handle them.

Without this quirk the driver becomes unstable and lock up and and crash.

I do not know exactly why, but it is probably due to the TOE (TCP offload engine) feature that is coupled with the segmentation feature - it is not possible to turn one part off and not the other, either both TOE and TSO are active, or neither of them.

Not having the TOE part active seems detrimental, as if that hardware feature is not really supposed to be turned off.

The datasheet says:

"Based on packet parsing and TCP connection/NAT table lookup results, the NetEngine puts the packets belonging to the same TCP connection to the same queue for the software to process. The NetEngine puts incoming packets to the buffer or series of buffers for a jumbo packet. With this hardware acceleration, IP/TCP header parsing, checksum validation and connection lookup are offloaded from the software processing."

After numerous tests with the hardware locking up after something between minutes and hours depending on load using iperf3 I have concluded this is necessary to stabilize the hardware.

Affected products

Remediation

No remediation recorded yet.

Weaknesses (0)

No CWE recorded.

References (11)

Change history (0)

No recorded changes yet.

Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner Linux
Published Jul 10, 2025
Updated Aug 5, 2026
Reserved Apr 16, 2025
NVD
Status Modified
Modified Jul 30, 2026
Red Hat
Severity n/a
Public date Jul 10, 2025