Commit Graph

2 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Yuchung Cheng
4f41b1c58a tcp: use RACK to detect losses
This patch implements the second half of RACK that uses the the most
recent transmit time among all delivered packets to detect losses.

tcp_rack_mark_lost() is called upon receiving a dubious ACK.
It then checks if an not-yet-sacked packet was sent at least
"reo_wnd" prior to the sent time of the most recently delivered.
If so the packet is deemed lost.

The "reo_wnd" reordering window starts with 1msec for fast loss
detection and changes to min-RTT/4 when reordering is observed.
We found 1msec accommodates well on tiny degree of reordering
(<3 pkts) on faster links. We use min-RTT instead of SRTT because
reordering is more of a path property but SRTT can be inflated by
self-inflicated congestion. The factor of 4 is borrowed from the
delayed early retransmit and seems to work reasonably well.

Since RACK is still experimental, it is now used as a supplemental
loss detection on top of existing algorithms. It is only effective
after the fast recovery starts or after the timeout occurs. The
fast recovery is still triggered by FACK and/or dupack threshold
instead of RACK.

We introduce a new sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_recovery for future
experiments of loss recoveries. For now RACK can be disabled by
setting it to 0.

Signed-off-by: Yuchung Cheng <ycheng@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Neal Cardwell <ncardwell@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
2015-10-21 07:00:53 -07:00
Yuchung Cheng
659a8ad56f tcp: track the packet timings in RACK
This patch is the first half of the RACK loss recovery.

RACK loss recovery uses the notion of time instead
of packet sequence (FACK) or counts (dupthresh). It's inspired by the
previous FACK heuristic in tcp_mark_lost_retrans(): when a limited
transmit (new data packet) is sacked, then current retransmitted
sequence below the newly sacked sequence must been lost,
since at least one round trip time has elapsed.

But it has several limitations:
1) can't detect tail drops since it depends on limited transmit
2) is disabled upon reordering (assumes no reordering)
3) only enabled in fast recovery ut not timeout recovery

RACK (Recently ACK) addresses these limitations with the notion
of time instead: a packet P1 is lost if a later packet P2 is s/acked,
as at least one round trip has passed.

Since RACK cares about the time sequence instead of the data sequence
of packets, it can detect tail drops when later retransmission is
s/acked while FACK or dupthresh can't. For reordering RACK uses a
dynamically adjusted reordering window ("reo_wnd") to reduce false
positives on ever (small) degree of reordering.

This patch implements tcp_advanced_rack() which tracks the
most recent transmission time among the packets that have been
delivered (ACKed or SACKed) in tp->rack.mstamp. This timestamp
is the key to determine which packet has been lost.

Consider an example that the sender sends six packets:
T1: P1 (lost)
T2: P2
T3: P3
T4: P4
T100: sack of P2. rack.mstamp = T2
T101: retransmit P1
T102: sack of P2,P3,P4. rack.mstamp = T4
T205: ACK of P4 since the hole is repaired. rack.mstamp = T101

We need to be careful about spurious retransmission because it may
falsely advance tp->rack.mstamp by an RTT or an RTO, causing RACK
to falsely mark all packets lost, just like a spurious timeout.

We identify spurious retransmission by the ACK's TS echo value.
If TS option is not applicable but the retransmission is acknowledged
less than min-RTT ago, it is likely to be spurious. We refrain from
using the transmission time of these spurious retransmissions.

The second half is implemented in the next patch that marks packet
lost using RACK timestamp.

Signed-off-by: Yuchung Cheng <ycheng@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Neal Cardwell <ncardwell@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
2015-10-21 07:00:48 -07:00