Re: [aqm] TCP ACK Suppression

David Lang <david@lang.hm> Wed, 07 October 2015 21:22 UTC

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Date: Wed, 07 Oct 2015 14:22:42 -0700
From: David Lang <david@lang.hm>
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To: Jonathan Morton <chromatix99@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [aqm] TCP ACK Suppression
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On Wed, 7 Oct 2015, Jonathan Morton wrote:

>> On 7 Oct, 2015, at 21:05, David Lang <david@lang.hm> wrote:
>>
>>>> It’s not “in the wild”, but this sort of thing is a headache for ELR.  It 
>>>> essentially means that it won’t be able to use AccECN for its feedback 
>>>> (since AccECN doesn’t allow reconstructing a complex 32-packet history of 
>>>> ECN codepoints from a single ACK), but must introduce some other mechanism 
>>>> to feed back the required data to the sender.
>>>
>>> but if you are getting all 32 acks at the same time, with no other packets 
>>> flowing, are you going to be able to do anything sane? do you mark every one 
>>> of the acks with ECN (sending a super-strong backoff message), or only mark 
>>> one of the acks (sending a weak backoff message)
>>
>> Also, how can you tell how many acks you 'should' get? what happens if the 
>> 1500 byte packets get combined into 9000 byte jumbo packets for the final 
>> hop? how many acks 'should' you get?
>
> Let me turn that around:
>
> What should a node which aggregates 1500-byte packets into jumbo frames set 
> the ECN field to on the resulting jumbo packet, if the ECN fields of the 
> original packets had different values?  I’m having some trouble imagining a 
> scenario where such destructive aggregation is permitted, except for TCP 
> proxies which should act as endpoints anyway.  GSO, in particular, requires 
> the headers to be identical in that respect, ensuring that the original 
> packets can be reconstructed (assuming they are MSS sized).

TCP data is supposed to be logically a continuous stream, it should not matter 
to the endpoints how it is packetized. So a conversion to/from jumbo frames 
should be acceptable.

David Lang