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: 5d9f4262b7 ("tcp: add SACK compression")
Reported-by: Jean-Louis Dupond <jean-louis@dupond.be>
Tested-by: Jean-Louis Dupond <jean-louis@dupond.be>
Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Acked-by: Neal Cardwell <ncardwell@google.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
86de5921a3