From: Eric Dumazet <redacted>
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2014 11:58:13 -0700

From: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>

Yuchung discovered tcp_is_cwnd_limited() was returning false in
slow start phase even if the application filled the socket write queue.

All congestion modules take into account tcp_is_cwnd_limited()
before increasing cwnd, so this behavior limits slow start from
probing the bandwidth at full speed.

The problem is that even if write queue is full (aka we are _not_
application limited), cwnd can be under utilized if TSO should auto
defer or TCP Small queues decided to hold packets.

So the in_flight can be kept to smaller value, and we can get to the
point tcp_is_cwnd_limited() returns false.

With TCP Small Queues and FQ/pacing, this issue is more visible.

We fix this by having tcp_cwnd_validate(), which is supposed to track
such things, take into account unsent_segs, the number of segs that we
are not sending at the moment due to TSO or TSQ, but intend to send
real soon. Then when we are cwnd-limited, remember this fact while we
are processing the window of ACKs that comes back.

For example, suppose we have a brand new connection with cwnd=10; we
are in slow start, and we send a flight of 9 packets. By the time we
have received ACKs for all 9 packets we want our cwnd to be 18.
We implement this by setting tp->lsnd_pending to 9, and
considering ourselves to be cwnd-limited while cwnd is less than
twice tp->lsnd_pending (2*9 -> 18).

This makes tcp_is_cwnd_limited() more understandable, by removing
the GSO/TSO kludge, that tried to work around the issue.

Note the in_flight parameter can be removed in a followup cleanup
patch.

Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Neal Cardwell <ncardwell@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Yuchung Cheng <redacted>

Applied, thanks Eric.

Indeed, once you remove the in_flight parameter from tcp_is_cwnd_limited()
you can subsequently delete it from the ->cong_avoid() method signature
and implementations.