Re: [Idr] WG LC for draft-ietf-idr-bgp-sendholdtimer-03 (3/23 to 4/12/2024)

[Jeffrey Haas <[e-mail]>]

> On Mar 25, 2024, at 1:36 PM, Ben Maddison <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> I think the fundamental issue with the text (and other similar parts or
> RFC 4271) is that sending the NOTIFICATION is mandatory, and must
> (obviously) happen before the socket is closed, leading to the naive
> interpretation that the send must complete before the remainder of the
> actions can proceed.
> 
> Expecting future readers to read this as "oh, I should enqueue this to
> my write-thread, drop the handle (or future, or whatever), and proceed
> to kill the socket" is asking too much.

And thus you come to the crux of the issue.

Anywhere we say "send a notification" would be vulnerable to stalling if we treated it as "... and wait until it's actually put at least into TCP locally before closing the connection".  

It might be worth writing this case up as an errata, especially since there's discussion about taking BGP forward in the standards track.

However, I wouldn't recommend trying to special case the correctness of this in the sendholdtimer.  That's more ocean than you want to boil here.

-- Jeff