Beniamino reported that he was getting an RTM_NEWLINK message for a
given interface, after the RTM_DELLINK for it. It turns out that the
message is a wireless extensions message, which was sent because the
interface had been connected and disconnection while it was deleted
caused a wext message.
For its netlink messages, wext uses RTM_NEWLINK, but the message is
without all the regular rtnetlink attributes, so "ip monitor link"
prints just rudimentary information:
5: wlan1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state DOWN group default
link/ether 02:00:00:00:01:00 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
Deleted 5: wlan1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN group default
link/ether 02:00:00:00:01:00 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
5: wlan1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP>
link/ether
(from my hwsim reproduction)
This can cause userspace to get confused since it doesn't expect an
RTM_NEWLINK message after RTM_DELLINK.
The reason for this is that wext schedules a worker to send out the
messages, and the scheduling delay can cause the messages to get out
to userspace in different order.
To fix this, have wext register a netdevice notifier and flush out
any pending messages when netdevice state changes. This fixes any
ordering whenever the original message wasn't sent by a notifier
itself.
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Reported-by: Beniamino Galvani <bgalvani@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Johannes Berg <johannes.berg@intel.com>