tcp: make the first N SYN RTO backoffs linear

Currently the SYN RTO schedule follows an exponential backoff
scheme, which can be unnecessarily conservative in cases where
there are link failures. In such cases, it's better to
aggressively try to retransmit packets, so it takes routers
less time to find a repath with a working link.

We chose a default value for this sysctl of 4, to follow
the macOS and IOS backoff scheme of 1,1,1,1,1,2,4,8, ...
MacOS and IOS have used this backoff schedule for over
a decade, since before this 2009 IETF presentation
discussed the behavior:
https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/75/slides/tcpm-1.pdf

This commit makes the SYN RTO schedule start with a number of
linear backoffs given by the following sysctl:
* tcp_syn_linear_timeouts

This changes the SYN RTO scheme to be: init_rto_val for
tcp_syn_linear_timeouts, exp backoff starting at init_rto_val

For example if init_rto_val = 1 and tcp_syn_linear_timeouts = 2, our
backoff scheme would be: 1, 1, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ...

Signed-off-by: David Morley <morleyd@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Yuchung Cheng <ycheng@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Neal Cardwell <ncardwell@google.com>
Tested-by: David Morley <morleyd@google.com>
Reviewed-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230509180558.2541885-1-morleyd.kernel@gmail.com
Signed-off-by: Paolo Abeni <pabeni@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/net/ipv4/tcp_ipv4.c b/net/ipv4/tcp_ipv4.c
index 39bda2b1066e..db24ed8f8509 100644
--- a/net/ipv4/tcp_ipv4.c
+++ b/net/ipv4/tcp_ipv4.c
@@ -3275,6 +3275,7 @@ static int __net_init tcp_sk_init(struct net *net)
 	else
 		net->ipv4.tcp_congestion_control = &tcp_reno;
 
+	net->ipv4.sysctl_tcp_syn_linear_timeouts = 4;
 	return 0;
 }