Why not patch drivers to not return an error for that case? It looks like iflib is not really doing anything with EBADMSG except returning early here.

Also, looking at em_isc_rxd_pkt_get(), is there some missing cleanup in the error path? It's not really clear to me how the driver is supposed to recover.

It doesn't look like there's any critical cleanup for em_isc_rxd_pkt_get() to do in that error case; all the other code in there after that just manipulates local variables or the packet info struct (which iflib could maybe choose to modify or do something with when it sees EBADMSG).

I don't know the specifics of em hardware, but I'd think that in theory the hardware would be fine just moving onto the next packet; I don't think it stops or needs some special routine to happen if it gets a bad packet.

But as for the error code, yeah, it doesn't currently functionally make sense to treat that error specially if nothing special happens as a result; returning 0 would be ok. Though, I guess keeping the error code would help with writing unit test code for this function. :p

all the other code in there after that just manipulates local variables or the packet info struct

I was wondering specifically about:

/* Zero out the receive descriptors status. */
rxd->wb.upper.status_error &= htole32(~0xFF);

Do we need to do that in the error case as well?

I'm not sure. We do clear those bits in the newer drivers, too, but it's not clear if that's a holdover from the legacy em to prevent processing the same descriptors multiple times in one function call/loop or if that's something that's necessary to keep things working normally.