Hello,

I have recently stumbled into an issue with my DPDK-based application
running the failsafe pmd. This pmd uses a tap device, with which my
application fails to start if more than 8 rx queues are used. This issue
appears to be related to this patch:
https://git.dpdk.org/dpdk/commit/?id=c36ce7099c2187926cd62cff7ebd479823554929

I have seen in the documentation that there was a limitation to 8 max
queues shared when using a tap device shared between multiple processes.
However, my application uses a single primary process, with no secondary
process, but it appears that I am still running into this limitation.

Now if we look at this small chunk of code:

memset(&msg, 0, sizeof(msg));
strlcpy(msg.name, TAP_MP_REQ_START_RXTX, sizeof(msg.name));
strlcpy(request_param->port_name, dev->data->name,
sizeof(request_param->port_name));
msg.len_param = sizeof(*request_param);
for (i = 0; i < dev->data->nb_tx_queues; i++) {
    msg.fds[fd_iterator++] = process_private->txq_fds[i];
    msg.num_fds++;
    request_param->txq_count++;
}
for (i = 0; i < dev->data->nb_rx_queues; i++) {
    msg.fds[fd_iterator++] = process_private->rxq_fds[i];
    msg.num_fds++;
    request_param->rxq_count++;
}
(Note that I am not using the latest DPDK version, but stable v23.11.1. But
I believe the issue is still present on latest.)

There are no checks on the maximum value i can take in the for loops. Since
the size of msg.fds is limited by the maximum of 8 queues shared between
process because of the IPC API, there is a potential buffer overflow which
can happen here.

See the struct declaration:
struct rte_mp_msg {
     char name[RTE_MP_MAX_NAME_LEN];
     int len_param;
     int num_fds;
     uint8_t param[RTE_MP_MAX_PARAM_LEN];
     int fds[RTE_MP_MAX_FD_NUM];
};

This means that if the number of queues used is more than 8, the program
will crash. This is what happens on my end as I get the following log:
*** stack smashing detected ***: terminated

Reverting the commit mentionned above fixes my issue. Also setting a check
like this works for me:

if (dev->data->nb_tx_queues + dev->data->nb_rx_queues > RTE_MP_MAX_FD_NUM)
     return -1;

I've made the changes on my local branch to fix my issue. This mail is just
to bring attention on this problem.
Thank you in advance for considering it.

Regards,
Edwin Brossette.