tcp: refresh TS.Recent for accepted old ACKs

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A TCP packet can carry new data while acknowledging traffic in the
opposite direction. With overlapping traffic in both directions, a
delayed packet's acknowledgment can be older than one Linux has already
accepted, even when that packet fills a gap in the received data.

Linux accepts the data, but tcp_ack() takes the old_ack path and skips
updating TS.Recent, the timestamp saved for outgoing acknowledgments.
The reply therefore echoes an older timestamp. If the sender uses this
echo to measure round-trip time after a long idle period, its estimate
includes the idle time and can reduce its sending rate.

Update TS.Recent in old_ack using tcp_replace_ts_recent(), before SACK
processing can trigger a transmission. This reuses the existing timestamp
and sequence checks, including PAWS protection against old duplicate
packets. ACK validation already rejects old ACKs in SYN_RECV before this
path, so no additional state check is needed.

Echoing the timestamp of the packet that fills the receive gap follows
RFC 7323 section 4.3. In a socket reproduction with 300 seconds idle,
controlled reordering and retransmission to exercise timestamp-based RTT
sampling, the sender's smoothed round-trip time was 37.5 seconds without
the fix and 15.5 ms with it.

Fixes: 12fb3dd9dc ("tcp: call tcp_replace_ts_recent() from tcp_ack()")
Assisted-by: LLM sparse
Signed-off-by: Jeff Jo <jeffjo@openai.com>
Reviewed-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>

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Jeff Jo 2026-09-24 15:44:58 -07:00 • committed by David S. Miller

parent 0d2c49915b

commit 1b92780ae4

1 changed files with 6 additions and 0 deletions

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net/ipv4/tcp_input.c

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