Bug ID 1695801: Intel E810 physical function (PF) triggers Malicious Driver Detection (MDD) and disables virtual function (VF) queue if packets with more than eight fragments are passed in egress traffic for transmission.

Last Modified: Nov 29, 2025

Affected Product(s):
BIG_IP_NEXT(CNF) CNF(all modules)

Known Affected Versions:
1.3.0, 1.3.1, 1.3.2, 1.3.3

Fixed In:
1.4.0

Opened: Oct 12, 2024

Severity: 3-Major

Symptoms

• Intel E810 PF triggers MDD and disables the VF queue when the application tries to send packets with more than 8 fragments. • The dmesg/kern.log file on the host contains the following message for the VF: kernel: ice <PCI coordinates of VF>: 1 Tx Malicious Driver Detection events detected on PF 1 VF 24 MAC <MAC address>.

Impact

Traffic flow across a specific TMM queue drops as the E810 PF disables the associated VF queue. In the tmm/ndal_tx_stats stats, the sent counter associated with the corresponding queue stops incrementing and the drop_full_dq counter starts incrementing.

Conditions

• Intel E810 VF used for the data-plane traffic. • TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) disabled. • Large receive offload (LRO) disabled.

Workaround

Once the VF queue is in disable state, reset the TMM application to reset the VF queues.

Fix Information

1. TSO (TCP Segmentation Offload) is disabled as a default. 2. Maximum fragments per packet value is set to 8, as per Intel E810 specification. Any packets receiving greater than 8 fragments will undergo packet compaction, which will reduce the fragment count to below 8 and avoids an MDD event. 3. A new counter pkt_compact is added to ndal_tx_stats to determine the number of packets compacted on egress. 4. After packet compaction, if the number of fragments still remains greater than 8, the packet is dropped with drop_too_many_frags counter in tmm/ndal_tx_stats incremented, and not sent out on egress avoiding the occurrence of an MDD event.

Behavior Change

Guides & references

K10134038: F5 Bug Tracker Filter Names and Tips