tcp: Stalling connections: Fix timeout calculation routine
authorDamian Lukowski <damian@tvk.rwth-aachen.de>
Mon, 7 Dec 2009 06:06:15 +0000 (06:06 +0000)
committerDavid S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Wed, 9 Dec 2009 04:56:11 +0000 (20:56 -0800)
commit07f29bc5bbae4e53e982ab956fed7207990a7786
treeb44506c37ce4886220439b38ef647c3cd7fbc6ce
parentcb19054697e92a793f336380fd72c588521178ff
tcp: Stalling connections: Fix timeout calculation routine

This patch fixes a problem in the TCP connection timeout calculation.
Currently, timeout decisions are made on the basis of the current
tcp_time_stamp and retrans_stamp, which is usually set at the first
retransmission.
However, if the retransmission fails in tcp_retransmit_skb(),
retrans_stamp is not updated and remains zero. This leads to wrong
decisions in retransmits_timed_out() if tcp_time_stamp is larger than
the specified timeout, which is very likely.
In this case, the TCP connection dies after the first attempted
(and unsuccessful) retransmission.

With this patch, tcp_skb_cb->when is used instead, when retrans_stamp
is not available.

This bug has been introduced together with retransmits_timed_out() in
2.6.32, as the number of retransmissions has been used for timeout
decisions before. The corresponding commit was
6fa12c85031485dff38ce550c24f10da23b0adaa (Revert Backoff [v3]:
Calculate TCP's connection close threshold as a time value.).

Thanks to Ilpo Järvinen for code suggestions and Frederic Leroy for
testing.

Reported-by: Frederic Leroy <fredo@starox.org>
Signed-off-by: Damian Lukowski <damian@tvk.rwth-aachen.de>
Acked-by: Ilpo Järvinen <ilpo.jarvinen@helsinki.fi>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
include/net/tcp.h