Commit bcefe17c authored Jun 15, 2013 by Cong Wang Committed by David S. Miller Jun 19, 2013

tcp: introduce a per-route knob for quick ack



In previous discussions, I tried to find some reasonable heuristics
for delayed ACK, however this seems not possible, according to Eric:

	"ACKS might also be delayed because of bidirectional
	traffic, and is more controlled by the application
	response time. TCP stack can not easily estimate it."

	"ACK can be incredibly useful to recover from losses in
	a short time.

	The vast majority of TCP sessions are small lived, and we
	send one ACK per received segment anyway at beginning or
	retransmits to let the sender smoothly increase its cwnd,
	so an auto-tuning facility wont help them that much."

and according to David:

	"ACKs are the only information we have to detect loss.

	And, for the same reasons that TCP VEGAS is fundamentally
	broken, we cannot measure the pipe or some other
	receiver-side-visible piece of information to determine
	when it's "safe" to stretch ACK.

	And even if it's "safe", we should not do it so that losses are
	accurately detected and we don't spuriously retransmit.

	The only way to know when the bandwidth increases is to
	"test" it, by sending more and more packets until drops happen.
	That's why all successful congestion control algorithms must
	operate on explicited tested pieces of information.

	Similarly, it's not really possible to universally know if
	it's safe to stretch ACK or not."

It still makes sense to enable or disable quick ack mode like
what TCP_QUICK_ACK does.

Similar to TCP_QUICK_ACK option, but for people who can't
modify the source code and still wants to control
TCP delayed ACK behavior. As David suggested, this should belong
to per-path scope, since different pathes may want different
behaviors.

Cc: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>
Cc: Rick Jones <rick.jones2@hp.com>
Cc: Stephen Hemminger <stephen@networkplumber.org>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Thomas Graf <tgraf@suug.ch>
CC: David Laight <David.Laight@ACULAB.COM>
Signed-off-by: Cong Wang <amwang@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>

parent 2c0740e4

include/uapi/linux/rtnetlink.h

+2 −0

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -386,6 +386,8 @@ enum {
		#define RTAX_RTO_MIN RTAX_RTO_MIN
		RTAX_INITRWND,
		#define RTAX_INITRWND RTAX_INITRWND
		RTAX_QUICKACK,
		#define RTAX_QUICKACK RTAX_QUICKACK
		__RTAX_MAX
		};

net/ipv4/tcp_input.c

+4 −1

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -3717,6 +3717,7 @@ void tcp_reset(struct sock *sk)
		static void tcp_fin(struct sock *sk)
		{
		struct tcp_sock *tp = tcp_sk(sk);
		const struct dst_entry *dst;

		inet_csk_schedule_ack(sk);

		@@ -3728,6 +3729,8 @@ static void tcp_fin(struct sock *sk)
		case TCP_ESTABLISHED:
		/* Move to CLOSE_WAIT */
		tcp_set_state(sk, TCP_CLOSE_WAIT);
		dst = __sk_dst_get(sk);
		if (!dst \|\| !dst_metric(dst, RTAX_QUICKACK))
		inet_csk(sk)->icsk_ack.pingpong = 1;
		break;

net/ipv4/tcp_output.c

+4 −2

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -160,6 +160,7 @@ static void tcp_event_data_sent(struct tcp_sock *tp,
		{
		struct inet_connection_sock *icsk = inet_csk(sk);
		const u32 now = tcp_time_stamp;
		const struct dst_entry *dst = __sk_dst_get(sk);

		if (sysctl_tcp_slow_start_after_idle &&
		(!tp->packets_out && (s32)(now - tp->lsndtime) > icsk->icsk_rto))
		@@ -170,7 +171,8 @@ static void tcp_event_data_sent(struct tcp_sock *tp,
		/* If it is a reply for ato after last received
		* packet, enter pingpong mode.
		*/
		if ((u32)(now - icsk->icsk_ack.lrcvtime) < icsk->icsk_ack.ato)
		if ((u32)(now - icsk->icsk_ack.lrcvtime) < icsk->icsk_ack.ato &&
		(!dst \|\| !dst_metric(dst, RTAX_QUICKACK)))
		icsk->icsk_ack.pingpong = 1;
		}

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