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Commit 86de5921 authored by Eric Dumazet's avatar Eric Dumazet Committed by David S. Miller
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tcp: defer SACK compression after DupThresh



Jean-Louis reported a TCP regression and bisected to recent SACK
compression.

After a loss episode (receiver not able to keep up and dropping
packets because its backlog is full), linux TCP stack is sending
a single SACK (DUPACK).

Sender waits a full RTO timer before recovering losses.

While RFC 6675 says in section 5, "Algorithm Details",

   (2) If DupAcks < DupThresh but IsLost (HighACK + 1) returns true --
       indicating at least three segments have arrived above the current
       cumulative acknowledgment point, which is taken to indicate loss
       -- go to step (4).
...
   (4) Invoke fast retransmit and enter loss recovery as follows:

there are old TCP stacks not implementing this strategy, and
still counting the dupacks before starting fast retransmit.

While these stacks probably perform poorly when receivers implement
LRO/GRO, we should be a little more gentle to them.

This patch makes sure we do not enable SACK compression unless
3 dupacks have been sent since last rcv_nxt update.

Ideally we should even rearm the timer to send one or two
more DUPACK if no more packets are coming, but that will
be work aiming for linux-4.21.

Many thanks to Jean-Louis for bisecting the issue, providing
packet captures and testing this patch.

Fixes: 5d9f4262 ("tcp: add SACK compression")
Reported-by: default avatarJean-Louis Dupond <jean-louis@dupond.be>
Tested-by: default avatarJean-Louis Dupond <jean-louis@dupond.be>
Signed-off-by: default avatarEric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Acked-by: default avatarNeal Cardwell <ncardwell@google.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
parent b5dd186d
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