Re: [lwip-users] Zero window and refused data problem

[Joel Cunningham]

Simon,

On Nov 08, 2016, at 02:54 AM, Simon Goldschmidt <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Oleg,

 

first of all, I think you are "misusing" TCP as a queue here (and at least our implementation is not really meant for this). It might work (or not, as you see), but in my opinion, the various timeouts implemented by various stacks impose the risk that your setup won't work if you change the client's system (e.g. update windows).

 

If I read correctly, by now you reported 2 possible issues:

1) segment is accepted but old window size is sent

 

I'm not sure what's best here. Of course, we must prevent silly window updates during normal operation. In your case, it would probably have been OK to send the actual/real window size, but we would haveto find a way to decide when it's OK and when not...

As we saw in https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?49128 (and I've also seen with Windows 7 as a receiver) a stack can ACK (increase ACK by 1) zero window probes which contain 1 byte from the next unsent segment, after the window is closed. In the case I've seen with Windows 7, the reported window size in the ACK is still 0.

We could separate the silly window avoidance from the update threshold setting because it should be safe to report the window once 1 MSS is available regardless of if the update threshold is 1/4 of the window.  This issue would still exist for when the application has read < 1 MSS of data though.  My understanding of the update threshold is that it reduces the number of window updates by giving a chance to combine the window update with an outgoing data segment/delayed ACK

From TCP/IP Illustraved Vol: 1, section 22.3:

The receiver must not advertise small windows. The normal algorithm is for the receiver not to advertise

a larger window than it is currently advertising (which can be 0) until the window can be increased by

either one full-sized segment (i.e„ the MSS being received) or by one-half the receiver's buffer space,

whichever is smaller

 

2) after storing a segment in "refused_data", no more ACKs are sent

 

The whole purpose of "refused_data" was to let the stack behave like a buffer overflowed: if your device cannot handle incoming data in the speed it is sent by the remote host, the remote host should throttle its sender. This is achieved by not handling/not answering a packet at all, just like it was dropped due to congestion. This should bring the remote host's TCP to send less. ACKing an old seqno instead might work for you, but I don't know what will be the result for all remote stacks, so I'm very reluctant to change this...

 

As you can see from this, TCP is meant to achieve the highest possible throughput possible for the combination of remote host, network and local host. What you want instead to make it a queue that keeps up a connection as long as possible without data being exchanged. I'm not fully convinced one can coexist with the other, but please come up with suggestions of how to fix this ;-)

 

 

Is the intent that an application would use the refused_data feature as part of it's normal workflow?  Or is it expected that once this condition happens, the developer becomes aware of it and either increases resources in the mbox receive buffer implementation (to match the configured window size) or reduce the configured window size since the system can't handle the data segment pattern?

 

Joel