N/A - CVE-2025-38331

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

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

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.