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Commit 49213555 authored by Daniel Borkmann's avatar Daniel Borkmann Committed by David S. Miller
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tcp: add rfc3168, section 6.1.1.1. fallback

This work as a follow-up of commit f7b3bec6 ("net: allow setting ecn
via routing table") and adds RFC3168 section 6.1.1.1. fallback for outgoing
ECN connections. In other words, this work adds a retry with a non-ECN
setup SYN packet, as suggested from the RFC on the first timeout:

  [...] A host that receives no reply to an ECN-setup SYN within the
  normal SYN retransmission timeout interval MAY resend the SYN and
  any subsequent SYN retransmissions with CWR and ECE cleared. [...]

Schematic client-side view when assuming the server is in tcp_ecn=2 mode,
that is, Linux default since 2009 via commit 255cac91 ("tcp: extend
ECN sysctl to allow server-side only ECN"):

 1) Normal ECN-capable path:

    SYN ECE CWR ----->
                <----- SYN ACK ECE
            ACK ----->

 2) Path with broken middlebox, when client has fallback:

    SYN ECE CWR ----X crappy middlebox drops packet
                      (timeout, rtx)
            SYN ----->
                <----- SYN ACK
            ACK ----->

In case we would not have the fallback implemented, the middlebox drop
point would basically end up as:

    SYN ECE CWR ----X crappy middlebox drops packet
                      (timeout, rtx)
    SYN ECE CWR ----X crappy middlebox drops packet
                      (timeout, rtx)
    SYN ECE CWR ----X crappy middlebox drops packet
                      (timeout, rtx)

In any case, it's rather a smaller percentage of sites where there would
occur such additional setup latency: it was found in end of 2014 that ~56%
of IPv4 and 65% of IPv6 servers of Alexa 1 million list would negotiate
ECN (aka tcp_ecn=2 default), 0.42% of these webservers will fail to connect
when trying to negotiate with ECN (tcp_ecn=1) due to timeouts, which the
fallback would mitigate with a slight latency trade-off. Recent related
paper on this topic:

  Brian Trammell, Mirja Kühlewind, Damiano Boppart, Iain Learmonth,
  Gorry Fairhurst, and Richard Scheffenegger:
    "Enabling Internet-Wide Deployment of Explicit Congestion Notification."
    Proc. PAM 2015, New York.
  http://ecn.ethz.ch/ecn-pam15.pdf

Thus, when net.ipv4.tcp_ecn=1 is being set, the patch will perform RFC3168,
section 6.1.1.1. fallback on timeout. For users explicitly not wanting this
which can be in DC use case, we add a net.ipv4.tcp_ecn_fallback knob that
allows for disabling the fallback.

tp->ecn_flags are not being cleared in tcp_ecn_clear_syn() on output, but
rather we let tcp_ecn_rcv_synack() take that over on input path in case a
SYN ACK ECE was delayed. Thus a spurious SYN retransmission will not prevent
ECN being negotiated eventually in that case.

Reference: https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/92/slides/slides-92-iccrg-1.pdf
Reference: https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/89/slides/slides-89-tsvarea-1.pdf


Signed-off-by: default avatarDaniel Borkmann <daniel@iogearbox.net>
Signed-off-by: default avatarFlorian Westphal <fw@strlen.de>
Signed-off-by: default avatarMirja Kühlewind <mirja.kuehlewind@tik.ee.ethz.ch>
Signed-off-by: default avatarBrian Trammell <trammell@tik.ee.ethz.ch>
Cc: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Cc: Dave That <dave.taht@gmail.com>
Acked-by: default avatarEric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
parent 134e0dbe
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