[efi] Pad transmit buffer length to work around vendor driver bugs

The Mellanox/Nvidia UEFI driver is built from the same codebase as the
iPXE driver, and appears to contain the bug that was fixed in commit
c11734e ("[golan] Use ETH_HLEN for inline header size").  This results
in identical failures when using the SNP or NII interface (via
e.g. snponly.efi) to drive a Mellanox card while EAPoL is enabled.

Work around the underlying UEFI driver bug by padding transmit I/O
buffers to the minimum Ethernet frame length before passing them to
the underlying driver's transmit function.

This padding is not technically necessary, since almost all modern
hardware will insert transmit padding as necessary (and where the
hardware does not support doing so, the underlying UEFI driver is
responsible for adding any necessary padding).  However, it is
guaranteed to be harmless (other than a miniscule performance impact):
the Ethernet specification requires zero padding up to the minimum
frame length for packets that are transmitted onto the wire, and so
the receiver will see the same packet whether or not we manually
insert this padding in software.

The additional padding causes the underlying Mellanox driver to avoid
its faulty code path, since it will never be asked to transmit a very
short packet.

Tested-by: Eric Hagberg <ehagberg@janestreet.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Brown <mcb30@ipxe.org>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/src/drivers/net/efi/nii.c b/src/drivers/net/efi/nii.c
index 8dd17e4b..16e9e10d 100644
--- a/src/drivers/net/efi/nii.c
+++ b/src/drivers/net/efi/nii.c
@@ -30,6 +30,7 @@ FILE_LICENCE ( GPL2_OR_LATER_OR_UBDL );
 #include <errno.h>
 #include <ipxe/netdevice.h>
 #include <ipxe/ethernet.h>
+#include <ipxe/if_ether.h>
 #include <ipxe/umalloc.h>
 #include <ipxe/efi/efi.h>
 #include <ipxe/efi/efi_driver.h>
@@ -998,6 +999,12 @@ static int nii_transmit ( struct net_device *netdev,
 		return 0;
 	}
 
+	/* Pad to minimum Ethernet length, to work around underlying
+	 * drivers that do not correctly handle frame padding
+	 * themselves.
+	 */
+	iob_pad ( iobuf, ETH_ZLEN );
+
 	/* Construct parameter block */
 	memset ( &cpb, 0, sizeof ( cpb ) );
 	cpb.FrameAddr = ( ( intptr_t ) iobuf->data );