Re: [PATCH 0/2] virtio_pci_modern: fix vp_reset() hang on unresponsive device

Abhin Parekadan Jose <[email protected]> Sun, 2 Aug 2026 18:28:03 +0000
Newsgroups dev.linux.lists.virtualization,org.kernel.vger.linux-kernel
Message-ID <am-MM4VLtULd3DNt@1c44f78ca37e>
On Sun, Aug 02, 2026 at 01:47:01PM -0400, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 02, 2026 at 05:40:57PM +0000, Abhin Parekadan Jose wrote:
> > While investigating a syzbot report of a WARN_ON_ONCE firing in
> > virtio_dev_remove() [1],
>
>
> And I responded to that syzbot report, and I quote:
>
> So it writes 0 into pci command, effectively killing the device,
> and then is unhappy that the driver prints warnings?
> Who thought it's a good idea? Why?

I was learning how to reproduce syzbot bugs when I found this
issue by writing 0 to PCI_COMMAND to simulate an unresponsive
device. While doing that I noticed that echo 1 > /sys/../remove
hung completely rather than just printing the warning. Since the
device_status register lives in the virtio common config MMIO
space and has defined values(based on the bits set) in the spec.
I thought it made sense for virtio to detect this and handle it
gracefully rather than spin forever, so I wrote up a small fix
for that.

> > I found a related but more serious issue:
> > vp_reset() in the modern virtio-pci transport can hang indefinitely
> > if PCI_COMMAND memory-space decode is disabled while the device is
> > bound (e.g. surprise removal, hardware fault, or -- as reproduced
> > here -- a direct write to the PCI_COMMAND register). The status
> > register poll loop has no way to distinguish "device still resetting"
> > from "device unreachable," so it never terminates.
> >
> > Patch 1 adds a VIRTIO_STATUS_ERROR() check that recognizes an
> > all-ones status read as invalid (per spec, bits 4-5 are reserved and
> > can never legitimately be set) and warns once at the point the bad
> > read actually happens.
> >
> > Patch 2 uses that check to break out of vp_reset()'s poll loop
> > instead of spinning forever.
>
> Was all this including the cover letter written with ai assistance?
> if yes pls disclose this.

Yes, I used AI assistance (Claude). The commit messages were written
by me and then refined with AI for spelling and grammar; the cover
letter was generated by Claude and reviewed by me. The code, testing,
and debugging were done by me -- I reproduced the hang in QEMU,
debugged to reach the hanging loop, and wrote the actual fix.

I should have disclosed this upfront. I'll do so in future
submissions.

Do I need to add Assisted-by: Claude <claude-4-6-sonnet> to the
commit messages?

P.S. This is my first kernel patch set.