• Gerrit Renker's avatar
    dccp ccid-3: Bug fix for the inter-packet scheduling algorithm · de6f2b59
    Gerrit Renker authored
    This fixes a subtle bug in the calculation of the inter-packet gap and shows
    that t_delta, as it is currently used, is not needed. And hence replaced.
    
    The algorithm from RFC 3448, 4.6 below continually computes a send time t_nom,
    which is initialised with the current time t_now; t_gran = 1E6 / HZ specifies
    the scheduling granularity, s the packet size, and X the sending rate:
    
      t_distance = t_nom - t_now;		// in microseconds
      t_delta    = min(t_ipi, t_gran) / 2;	// `delta' parameter in microseconds
    
      if (t_distance >= t_delta) {
    	reschedule after (t_distance / 1000) milliseconds;
      } else {
      	t_ipi  = s / X;			// inter-packet interval in usec
    	t_nom += t_ipi;			// compute the next send time
    	send packet now;
      }
    
    
    1) Description of the bug
    -------------------------
    Rescheduling requires a conversion into milliseconds, due to this call chain:
    
     * ccid3_hc_tx_send_packet() returns a timeout in milliseconds,
     * this value is converted by msecs_to_jiffies() in dccp_write_xmit(),
     * and finally used as jiffy-expires-value for sk_reset_timer().
    
    The highest jiffy resolution with HZ=1000 is 1 millisecond, so using a higher
    granularity does not make much sense here.
    
    As a consequence, values of t_distance < 1000 are truncated to 0. This issue 
    has so far been resolved by using instead
    
      if (t_distance >= t_delta + 1000)
    	reschedule after (t_distance / 1000) milliseconds;
    
    The bug is in artificially inflating t_delta to t_delta' = t_delta + 1000. This
    is unnecessarily large, a more adequate value is t_delta' = max(t_delta, 1000).
    
    
    2) Consequences of using the corrected t_delta'
    -----------------------------------------------
    Since t_delta <= t_gran/2 = 10^6/(2*HZ), we have t_delta <= 1000 as long as
    HZ >= 500. This means that t_delta' = max(1000, t_delta) is constant at 1000.
    
    On the other hand, when using a coarse HZ value of HZ < 500, we have three
    sub-cases that can all be reduced to using another constant of t_gran/2.
    
     (a) The first case arises when t_ipi > t_gran. Here t_delta' is the constant
         t_delta' = max(1000, t_gran/2) = t_gran/2.
    
     (b) If t_ipi <= 2000 < t_gran = 10^6/HZ usec, then t_delta = t_ipi/2 <= 1000,
         so that t_delta' = max(1000, t_delta) = 1000 < t_gran/2. 
    
     (c) If 2000 < t_ipi <= t_gran, we have t_delta' = max(t_delta, 1000) = t_ipi/2.
    
    In the second and third cases we have delay values less than t_gran/2, which is
    in the order of less than or equal to half a jiffy. 
    
    How these are treated depends on how fractions of a jiffy are handled: they
    are either always rounded down to 0, or always rounded up to 1 jiffy (assuming
    non-zero values). In both cases the error is on average in the order of 50%.
    
    Thus we are not increasing the error when in the second/third case we replace
    a value less than t_gran/2 with 0, by setting t_delta' to the constant t_gran/2.
    
    
    3) Summary
    ----------
    Fixing (1) and considering (2), the patch replaces t_delta with a constant,
    whose value depends on CONFIG_HZ, changing the above algorithm to:
     
      if (t_distance >= t_delta')
    	reschedule after (t_distance / 1000) milliseconds;
    
    where t_delta' = 10^6/(2*HZ) if HZ < 500, and t_delta' = 1000 otherwise.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarGerrit Renker <gerrit@erg.abdn.ac.uk>
    de6f2b59
ccid3.h 5.88 KB