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The ACK filter is an optional feature of CAKE which is designed to improve performance on links with very asymmetrical rate limits. On such links (which are unfortunately quite prevalent, especially for DSL and cable subscribers), the downstream throughput can be limited by the number of ACKs capable of being transmitted in the *upstream* direction. Filtering ACKs can, in general, have adverse effects on TCP performance because it interferes with ACK clocking (especially in slow start), and it reduces the flow's resiliency to ACKs being dropped further along the path. To alleviate these drawbacks, the ACK filter in CAKE tries its best to always keep enough ACKs queued to ensure forward progress in the TCP flow being filtered. It does this by only filtering redundant ACKs. In its default 'conservative' mode, the filter will always keep at least two redundant ACKs in the queue, while in 'aggressive' mode, it will filter down to a single ACK. The ACK filter works by inspecting the per-flow queue on every packet enqueue. Starting at the head of the queue, the filter looks for another eligible packet to drop (so the ACK being dropped is always closer to the head of the queue than the packet being enqueued). An ACK is eligible only if it ACKs *fewer* bytes than the new packet being enqueued, including any SACK options. This prevents duplicate ACKs from being filtered, to avoid interfering with retransmission logic. In addition, we check TCP header options and only drop those that are known to not interfere with sender state. In particular, packets with unknown option codes are never dropped. In aggressive mode, an eligible packet is always dropped, while in conservative mode, at least two ACKs are kept in the queue. Only pure ACKs (with no data segments) are considered eligible for dropping, but when an ACK with data segments is enqueued, this can cause another pure ACK to become eligible for dropping. The approach described above ensures that this ACK filter avoids most of the drawbacks of a naive filtering mechanism that only keeps flow state but does not inspect the queue. This is the rationale for including the ACK filter in CAKE itself rather than as separate module (as the TC filter, for instance). Our performance evaluation has shown that on a 30/1 Mbps link with a bidirectional traffic test (RRUL), turning on the ACK filter on the upstream link improves downstream throughput by ~20% (both modes) and upstream throughput by ~12% in conservative mode and ~40% in aggressive mode, at the cost of ~5ms of inter-flow latency due to the increased congestion. In *really* pathological cases, the effect can be a lot more; for instance, the ACK filter increases the achievable downstream throughput on a link with 100 Kbps in the upstream direction by an order of magnitude (from ~2.5 Mbps to ~25 Mbps). Finally, even though we consider the ACK filter to be safer than most, we do not recommend turning it on everywhere: on more symmetrical link bandwidths the effect is negligible at best. Cc: Yuchung Cheng <ycheng@google.com> Cc: Neal Cardwell <ncardwell@google.com> Signed-off-by: Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@toke.dk> Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net> |
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README
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.