Re: [PATCH] tcp: fix tcp_trim_head() to adjust segment count with skb MSS

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 7:29 PM, Neal Cardwell [off-list ref] wrote:

This commit fixes tcp_trim_head() to recalculate the number of
segments in the skb with the skb's existing MSS, so trimming the head
causes the skb segment count to be monotonically non-increasing - it
should stay the same or go down, but not increase.

Previously tcp_trim_head() used the current MSS of the connection. But
if there was a decrease in MSS between original transmission and ACK
(e.g. due to PMTUD), this could cause tcp_trim_head() to
counter-intuitively increase the segment count when trimming bytes off
the head of an skb. This violated assumptions in tcp_tso_acked() that
tcp_trim_head() only decreases the packet count, so that packets_acked
in tcp_tso_acked() could underflow, leading tcp_clean_rtx_queue() to
pass u32 pkts_acked values as large as 0xffffffff to
ca_ops->pkts_acked().

As an aside, if tcp_trim_head() had really wanted the skb to reflect
the current MSS, it should have called tcp_set_skb_tso_segs()
unconditionally, since a decrease in MSS would mean that a
single-packet skb should now be sliced into multiple segments.

Signed-off-by: Neal Cardwell <ncardwell@google.com>

Acked-by: Nandita Dukkipati <redacted>