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>

1 files changed, 6 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/tcp.h b/include/linux/tcp.h
index 8c54863dfc38..5dce9705fe84 100644
--- a/include/linux/tcp.h
+++ b/include/linux/tcp.h
@@ -194,6 +194,12 @@ struct tcp_sock {
 	u32	window_clamp;	/* Maximal window to advertise		*/
 	u32	rcv_ssthresh;	/* Current window clamp			*/
 
+	/* Information of the most recently (s)acked skb */
+	struct tcp_rack {
+		struct skb_mstamp mstamp; /* (Re)sent time of the skb */
+		u8 advanced; /* mstamp advanced since last lost marking */
+		u8 reord;    /* reordering detected */
+	} rack;
 	u16	advmss;		/* Advertised MSS			*/
 	u8	unused;
 	u8	nonagle     : 4,/* Disable Nagle algorithm?             */