10 Jul, 2013
2 commits
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Pull networking updates from David Miller:
"This is a re-do of the net-next pull request for the current merge
window. The only difference from the one I made the other day is that
this has Eliezer's interface renames and the timeout handling changes
made based upon your feedback, as well as a few bug fixes that have
trickeled in.Highlights:
1) Low latency device polling, eliminating the cost of interrupt
handling and context switches. Allows direct polling of a network
device from socket operations, such as recvmsg() and poll().Currently ixgbe, mlx4, and bnx2x support this feature.
Full high level description, performance numbers, and design in
commit 0a4db187a999 ("Merge branch 'll_poll'")From Eliezer Tamir.
2) With the routing cache removed, ip_check_mc_rcu() gets exercised
more than ever before in the case where we have lots of multicast
addresses. Use a hash table instead of a simple linked list, from
Eric Dumazet.3) Add driver for Atheros CQA98xx 802.11ac wireless devices, from
Bartosz Markowski, Janusz Dziedzic, Kalle Valo, Marek Kwaczynski,
Marek Puzyniak, Michal Kazior, and Sujith Manoharan.4) Support reporting the TUN device persist flag to userspace, from
Pavel Emelyanov.5) Allow controlling network device VF link state using netlink, from
Rony Efraim.6) Support GRE tunneling in openvswitch, from Pravin B Shelar.
7) Adjust SOCK_MIN_RCVBUF and SOCK_MIN_SNDBUF for modern times, from
Daniel Borkmann and Eric Dumazet.8) Allow controlling of TCP quickack behavior on a per-route basis,
from Cong Wang.9) Several bug fixes and improvements to vxlan from Stephen
Hemminger, Pravin B Shelar, and Mike Rapoport. In particular,
support receiving on multiple UDP ports.10) Major cleanups, particular in the area of debugging and cookie
lifetime handline, to the SCTP protocol code. From Daniel
Borkmann.11) Allow packets to cross network namespaces when traversing tunnel
devices. From Nicolas Dichtel.12) Allow monitoring netlink traffic via AF_PACKET sockets, in a
manner akin to how we monitor real network traffic via ptype_all.
From Daniel Borkmann.13) Several bug fixes and improvements for the new alx device driver,
from Johannes Berg.14) Fix scalability issues in the netem packet scheduler's time queue,
by using an rbtree. From Eric Dumazet.15) Several bug fixes in TCP loss recovery handling, from Yuchung
Cheng.16) Add support for GSO segmentation of MPLS packets, from Simon
Horman.17) Make network notifiers have a real data type for the opaque
pointer that's passed into them. Use this to properly handle
network device flag changes in arp_netdev_event(). From Jiri
Pirko and Timo Teräs.18) Convert several drivers over to module_pci_driver(), from Peter
Huewe.19) tcp_fixup_rcvbuf() can loop 500 times over loopback, just use a
O(1) calculation instead. From Eric Dumazet.20) Support setting of explicit tunnel peer addresses in ipv6, just
like ipv4. From Nicolas Dichtel.21) Protect x86 BPF JIT against spraying attacks, from Eric Dumazet.
22) Prevent a single high rate flow from overruning an individual cpu
during RX packet processing via selective flow shedding. From
Willem de Bruijn.23) Don't use spinlocks in TCP md5 signing fast paths, from Eric
Dumazet.24) Don't just drop GSO packets which are above the TBF scheduler's
burst limit, chop them up so they are in-bounds instead. Also
from Eric Dumazet.25) VLAN offloads are missed when configured on top of a bridge, fix
from Vlad Yasevich.26) Support IPV6 in ping sockets. From Lorenzo Colitti.
27) Receive flow steering targets should be updated at poll() time
too, from David Majnemer.28) Fix several corner case regressions in PMTU/redirect handling due
to the routing cache removal, from Timo Teräs.29) We have to be mindful of ipv4 mapped ipv6 sockets in
upd_v6_push_pending_frames(). From Hannes Frederic Sowa.30) Fix L2TP sequence number handling bugs, from James Chapman."
* git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net-next: (1214 commits)
drivers/net: caif: fix wrong rtnl_is_locked() usage
drivers/net: enic: release rtnl_lock on error-path
vhost-net: fix use-after-free in vhost_net_flush
net: mv643xx_eth: do not use port number as platform device id
net: sctp: confirm route during forward progress
virtio_net: fix race in RX VQ processing
virtio: support unlocked queue poll
net/cadence/macb: fix bug/typo in extracting gem_irq_read_clear bit
Documentation: Fix references to defunct linux-net@vger.kernel.org
net/fs: change busy poll time accounting
net: rename low latency sockets functions to busy poll
bridge: fix some kernel warning in multicast timer
sfc: Fix memory leak when discarding scattered packets
sit: fix tunnel update via netlink
dt:net:stmmac: Add dt specific phy reset callback support.
dt:net:stmmac: Add support to dwmac version 3.610 and 3.710
dt:net:stmmac: Allocate platform data only if its NULL.
net:stmmac: fix memleak in the open method
ipv6: rt6_check_neigh should successfully verify neigh if no NUD information are available
net: ipv6: fix wrong ping_v6_sendmsg return value
... -
linux-net@vger.kernel.org was replaced by netdev@oss.sgi.com was replaced
by netdev@vger.kernel.org.Signed-off-by: Geert Uytterhoeven
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
05 Jul, 2013
1 commit
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Pull trivial tree updates from Jiri Kosina:
"The usual stuff from trivial tree"* 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jikos/trivial: (34 commits)
treewide: relase -> release
Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt: fix stat file documentation
sysctl/net.txt: delete reference to obsolete 2.4.x kernel
spinlock_api_smp.h: fix preprocessor comments
treewide: Fix typo in printk
doc: device tree: clarify stuff in usage-model.txt.
open firmware: "/aliasas" -> "/aliases"
md: bcache: Fixed a typo with the word 'arithmetic'
irq/generic-chip: fix a few kernel-doc entries
frv: Convert use of typedef ctl_table to struct ctl_table
sgi: xpc: Convert use of typedef ctl_table to struct ctl_table
doc: clk: Fix incorrect wording
Documentation/arm/IXP4xx fix a typo
Documentation/networking/ieee802154 fix a typo
Documentation/DocBook/media/v4l fix a typo
Documentation/video4linux/si476x.txt fix a typo
Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt fix a typo
Documentation/early-userspace/README fix a typo
Documentation/video4linux/soc-camera.txt fix a typo
lguest: fix CONFIG_PAE -> CONFIG_x86_PAE in comment
...
04 Jul, 2013
1 commit
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Conflicts:
drivers/net/ethernet/freescale/fec_main.c
drivers/net/ethernet/renesas/sh_eth.c
net/ipv4/gre.cThe GRE conflict is between a bug fix (kfree_skb --> kfree_skb_list)
and the splitting of the gre.c code into seperate files.The FEC conflict was two sets of changes adding ethtool support code
in an "!CONFIG_M5272" CPP protected block.Finally the sh_eth.c conflict was between one commit add bits set
in the .eesr_err_check mask whilst another commit removed the
.tx_error_check member and assignments.Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
01 Jul, 2013
1 commit
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Pablo Neira Ayuso says:
====================
The following batch contains Netfilter/IPVS updates for net-next,
they are:* Enforce policy to several nfnetlink subsystem, from Daniel
Borkmann.* Use xt_socket to match the third packet (to perform simplistic
socket-based stateful filtering), from Eric Dumazet.* Avoid large timeout for picked up from the middle TCP flows,
from Florian Westphal.* Exclude IPVS from struct net if IPVS is disabled and removal
of unnecessary included header file, from JunweiZhang.* Release SCTP connection immediately under load, to mimic current
TCP behaviour, from Julian Anastasov.* Replace and enhance SCTP state machine, from Julian Anastasov.
* Add tweak to reduce sync traffic in the presence of persistence,
also from Julian Anastasov.* Add tweak for the IPVS SH scheduler not to reject connections
directed to a server, choose a new one instead, from Alexander
Frolkin.* Add support for sloppy TCP and SCTP modes, that creates state
information on any packet, not only initial handshake packets,
from Alexander Frolkin.
====================Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
26 Jun, 2013
4 commits
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Add sync_persist_mode flag to reduce sync traffic
by syncing only persistent templates.Signed-off-by: Julian Anastasov
Tested-by: Aleksey Chudov
Signed-off-by: Simon Horman -
Currently, we fail only when all of the ips in arp_ip_target are gone.
However, in some situations we might need to fail if even one host from
arp_ip_target becomes unavailable.All situations, obviously, rely on the idea that we need *completely*
functional network, with all interfaces/addresses working correctly.One real world example might be:
vlans on top on bond (hybrid port). If bond and vlans have ips assigned
and we have their peers monitored via arp_ip_target - in case of switch
misconfiguration (trunk/access port), slave driver malfunction or
tagged/untagged traffic dropped on the way - we will be able to switch
to another slave.Though any other configuration needs that if we need to have access to all
arp_ip_targets.This patch adds this possibility by adding a new parameter -
arp_all_targets (both as a module parameter and as a sysfs knob). It can be
set to:0 or any (the default) - which works exactly as it's working now -
the slave is up if any of the arp_ip_targets are up.1 or all - the slave is up if all of the arp_ip_targets are up.
This parameter can be changed on the fly (via sysfs), and requires the mode
to be active-backup and arp_validate to be enabled (it obeys the
arp_validate config on which slaves to validate).Internally it's done through:
1) Add target_last_arp_rx[BOND_MAX_ARP_TARGETS] array to slave struct. It's
an array of jiffies, meaning that slave->target_last_arp_rx[i] is the
last time we've received arp from bond->params.arp_targets[i] on this
slave.2) If we successfully validate an arp from bond->params.arp_targets[i] in
bond_validate_arp() - update the slave->target_last_arp_rx[i] with the
current jiffies value.3) When getting slave's last_rx via slave_last_rx(), we return the oldest
time when we've received an arp from any address in
bond->params.arp_targets[].If the value of arp_all_targets == 0 - we still work the same way as
before.Also, update the documentation to reflect the new parameter.
v3->v4:
Kill the forgotten rtnl_unlock(), rephrase the documentation part to be
more clear, don't fail setting arp_all_targets if arp_validate is not set -
it has no effect anyway but can be easier to set up. Also, print a warning
if the last arp_ip_target is removed while the arp_interval is on, but not
the arp_validate.v2->v3:
Use _bh spinlock, remove useless rtnl_lock() and use jiffies for new
arp_ip_target last arp, instead of slave_last_rx(). On bond_enslave(),
use the same initialization value for target_last_arp_rx[] as is used
for the default last_arp_rx, to avoid useless interface flaps.Also, instead of failing to remove the last arp_ip_target just print a
warning - otherwise it might break existing scripts.v1->v2:
Correctly handle adding/removing hosts in arp_ip_target - we need to
shift/initialize all slave's target_last_arp_rx. Also, don't fail module
loading on arp_all_targets misconfiguration, just disable it, and some
minor style fixes.Signed-off-by: Veaceslav Falico
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller -
Add some details to bonding documentation on how backup slave arp
validation works.Signed-off-by: Veaceslav Falico
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller -
Cc: Patrick McHardy
Cc: David S. Miller
Signed-off-by: Cong Wang
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
24 Jun, 2013
1 commit
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syncookies is on for default since in commit e994b7c901
(tcp: Don't make syn cookies initial setting depend on CONFIG_SYSCTL).And fix a typo of CONFIG_SYN_COOKIES.
Signed-off-by: Shan Wei
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
13 Jun, 2013
1 commit
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commit 6648bd7e0e62c0c8c03b (ipv4: Add sysctl knob to control
early socket demux) introduced such sysctl, but forgot to add
doc into Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt. This patch adds it.Basically I grab the doc from the description of commit 41063e9dd11956f2d285
(ipv4: Early TCP socket demux.) and the above commit.Cc: Eric Dumazet
Cc: Alexander Duyck
Cc: David S. Miller
Signed-off-by: Cong Wang
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
08 Jun, 2013
2 commits
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This patch fixes icmp_ignore_bogus_error_responses default value to be 1 instead
of FALSE. It is initialized to 1 in icmp_sk_init().Signed-off-by: Rami Rosen
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller -
This patch simplifies the tpacket_v3 example code a bit by getting rid
of unecessary macro wrappers, removing some debugging code so that it is
more to the point, and also adds a header comment. Now this example code
is the very minimum one needs to start from when dealing with tpacket_v3
and ~100 lines smaller than before.Signed-off-by: Daniel Borkmann
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
05 Jun, 2013
1 commit
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Corrected the words Accsess to Access.
Signed-off-by: Stefan Huber
Acked-by: Randy Dunlap
Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina
28 May, 2013
3 commits
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Signed-off-by: Anatol Pomozov
Signed-off-by: Jiri Kosina -
As Stephen proposed:
Since bonding supports configuration via iproute (netlink) and sysfs, I think
it is time to purge the old ifenslave code out of Documentation/networking
and update the documentation.Suggested-by: Stephen Hemminger
Cc: Stephen Hemminger
Cc: Jay Vosburgh
Cc: "David S. Miller"
Signed-off-by: Cong Wang
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller -
Correct spelling typo
Signed-off-by: Masanari Iida
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
24 May, 2013
1 commit
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Explain the mechanism and API of the recently merged
rps flow limit patch.Signed-off-by: Willem de Bruijn
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
25 Apr, 2013
1 commit
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Bring the timestamping section in sync with the implementation.
Signed-off-by: Daniel Borkmann
Acked-by: Willem de Bruijn
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
20 Apr, 2013
1 commit
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Signed-off-by: Patrick McHardy
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
09 Apr, 2013
2 commits
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This patch reviews the driver documentation file;
for example, there were some new fields (in the driver
module parameter section) and the ptp files were
not documented.Signed-off-by: Giuseppe Cavallaro
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller -
Check for NULL before calling the following operations from "struct
ieee802154_mlme_ops": assoc_req, assoc_resp, disassoc_req, start_req,
and scan_req.This fixes a current oops where those functions are called but not
implemented. It also updates the documentation to clarify that they
are now optional by design. If a call to an unimplemented function
is attempted, the kernel returns EOPNOTSUPP via netlink.The following operations are still required: get_phy, get_pan_id,
get_short_addr, and get_dsn.Note that the places where this patch changes the initialization
of "ret" should not affect the rest of the code since "ret" was
always set (again) before returning its value.Signed-off-by: Werner Almesberger
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
31 Mar, 2013
1 commit
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Lost in space for a long time, but it finally came back to us from
some ancient code tombs. This patch adds a minimal runnable example
of Linux' packet mmap(2) from Chetan Loke's TPACKET_V3. Special
thanks to David S. Miller, and also Eric Leblond and Victor Julien!Cc: Eric Leblond
Cc: Victor Julien
Signed-off-by: Daniel Borkmann
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
27 Mar, 2013
1 commit
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This patch updates the stmmac.txt file adding information related to the PTP
and SGMII/RGMII supports.Also the patch updates the driver version to: March_2013.
Signed-off-by: Giuseppe Cavallaro
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
21 Mar, 2013
3 commits
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This patch implements F-RTO (foward RTO recovery):
When the first retransmission after timeout is acknowledged, F-RTO
sends new data instead of old data. If the next ACK acknowledges
some never-retransmitted data, then the timeout was spurious and the
congestion state is reverted. Otherwise if the next ACK selectively
acknowledges the new data, then the timeout was genuine and the
loss recovery continues. This idea applies to recurring timeouts
as well. While F-RTO sends different data during timeout recovery,
it does not (and should not) change the congestion control.The implementaion follows the three steps of SACK enhanced algorithm
(section 3) in RFC5682. Step 1 is in tcp_enter_loss(). Step 2 and
3 are in tcp_process_loss(). The basic version is not supported
because SACK enhanced version also works for non-SACK connections.The new implementation is functionally in parity with the old F-RTO
implementation except the one case where it increases undo events:
In addition to the RFC algorithm, a spurious timeout may be detected
without sending data in step 2, as long as the SACK confirms not
all the original data are dropped. When this happens, the sender
will undo the cwnd and perhaps enter fast recovery instead. This
additional check increases the F-RTO undo events by 5x compared
to the prior implementation on Google Web servers, since the sender
often does not have new data to send for HTTP.Note F-RTO may detect spurious timeout before Eifel with timestamps
does so.Signed-off-by: Yuchung Cheng
Acked-by: Eric Dumazet
Acked-by: Neal Cardwell
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller -
The patch series refactor the F-RTO feature (RFC4138/5682).
This is to simplify the loss recovery processing. Existing F-RTO
was developed during the experimental stage (RFC4138) and has
many experimental features. It takes a separate code path from
the traditional timeout processing by overloading CA_Disorder
instead of using CA_Loss state. This complicates CA_Disorder state
handling because it's also used for handling dubious ACKs and undos.
While the algorithm in the RFC does not change the congestion control,
the implementation intercepts congestion control in various places
(e.g., frto_cwnd in tcp_ack()).The new code implements newer F-RTO RFC5682 using CA_Loss processing
path. F-RTO becomes a small extension in the timeout processing
and interfaces with congestion control and Eifel undo modules.
It lets congestion control (module) determines how many to send
independently. F-RTO only chooses what to send in order to detect
spurious retranmission. If timeout is found spurious it invokes
existing Eifel undo algorithms like DSACK or TCP timestamp based
detection.The first patch removes all F-RTO code except the sysctl_tcp_frto is
left for the new implementation. Since CA_EVENT_FRTO is removed, TCP
westwood now computes ssthresh on regular timeout CA_EVENT_LOSS event.Signed-off-by: Yuchung Cheng
Acked-by: Neal Cardwell
Acked-by: Eric Dumazet
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller -
Pull in the 'net' tree to get Daniel Borkmann's flow dissector
infrastructure change.Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
19 Mar, 2013
1 commit
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Dmitry Akindinov is reporting for a problem where SYNs are looping
between the master and backup server when the backup server is used as
real server in DR mode and has IPVS rules to function as director.Even when the backup function is enabled we continue to forward
traffic and schedule new connections when the current master is using
the backup server as real server. While this is not a problem for NAT,
for DR and TUN method the backup server can not determine if a request
comes from client or from director.To avoid such loops add new sysctl flag backup_only. It can be needed
for DR/TUN setups that do not need backup and director function at the
same time. When the backup function is enabled we stop any forwarding
and pass the traffic to the local stack (real server mode). The flag
disables the director function when the backup function is enabled.For setups that enable backup function for some virtual services and
director function for other virtual services there should be another
more complex solution to support DR/TUN mode, may be to assign
per-virtual service syncid value, so that we can differentiate the
requests.Reported-by: Dmitry Akindinov
Tested-by: German Myzovsky
Signed-off-by: Julian Anastasov
Signed-off-by: Simon Horman
18 Mar, 2013
1 commit
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TCPCT uses option-number 253, reserved for experimental use and should
not be used in production environments.
Further, TCPCT does not fully implement RFC 6013.As a nice side-effect, removing TCPCT increases TCP's performance for
very short flows:Doing an apache-benchmark with -c 100 -n 100000, sending HTTP-requests
for files of 1KB size.before this patch:
average (among 7 runs) of 20845.5 Requests/Second
after:
average (among 7 runs) of 21403.6 Requests/SecondSigned-off-by: Christoph Paasch
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
15 Mar, 2013
1 commit
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The default value is 128, not 256
#grep gc_thresh1 net/ -rI
net/decnet/dn_neigh.c: .gc_thresh1 = 128,
net/ipv6/ndisc.c: .gc_thresh1 = 128,
net/ipv4/arp.c: .gc_thresh1 = 128,Signed-off-by: Li RongQing
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
12 Mar, 2013
1 commit
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This patch series implement the Tail loss probe (TLP) algorithm described
in http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dukkipati-tcpm-tcp-loss-probe-01. The
first patch implements the basic algorithm.TLP's goal is to reduce tail latency of short transactions. It achieves
this by converting retransmission timeouts (RTOs) occuring due
to tail losses (losses at end of transactions) into fast recovery.
TLP transmits one packet in two round-trips when a connection is in
Open state and isn't receiving any ACKs. The transmitted packet, aka
loss probe, can be either new or a retransmission. When there is tail
loss, the ACK from a loss probe triggers FACK/early-retransmit based
fast recovery, thus avoiding a costly RTO. In the absence of loss,
there is no change in the connection state.PTO stands for probe timeout. It is a timer event indicating
that an ACK is overdue and triggers a loss probe packet. The PTO value
is set to max(2*SRTT, 10ms) and is adjusted to account for delayed
ACK timer when there is only one oustanding packet.TLP Algorithm
On transmission of new data in Open state:
-> packets_out > 1: schedule PTO in max(2*SRTT, 10ms).
-> packets_out == 1: schedule PTO in max(2*RTT, 1.5*RTT + 200ms)
-> PTO = min(PTO, RTO)Conditions for scheduling PTO:
-> Connection is in Open state.
-> Connection is either cwnd limited or no new data to send.
-> Number of probes per tail loss episode is limited to one.
-> Connection is SACK enabled.When PTO fires:
new_segment_exists:
-> transmit new segment.
-> packets_out++. cwnd remains same.no_new_packet:
-> retransmit the last segment.
Its ACK triggers FACK or early retransmit based recovery.ACK path:
-> rearm RTO at start of ACK processing.
-> reschedule PTO if need be.In addition, the patch includes a small variation to the Early Retransmit
(ER) algorithm, such that ER and TLP together can in principle recover any
N-degree of tail loss through fast recovery. TLP is controlled by the same
sysctl as ER, tcp_early_retrans sysctl.
tcp_early_retrans==0; disables TLP and ER.
==1; enables RFC5827 ER.
==2; delayed ER.
==3; TLP and delayed ER. [DEFAULT]
==4; TLP only.The TLP patch series have been extensively tested on Google Web servers.
It is most effective for short Web trasactions, where it reduced RTOs by 15%
and improved HTTP response time (average by 6%, 99th percentile by 10%).
The transmitted probes account for
Acked-by: Neal Cardwell
Acked-by: Yuchung Cheng
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
07 Mar, 2013
1 commit
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Signed-off-by: Jason Wang
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
06 Feb, 2013
1 commit
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TCP Appropriate Byte Count was added by me, but later disabled.
There is no point in maintaining it since it is a potential source
of bugs and Linux already implements other better window protection
heuristics.Signed-off-by: Stephen Hemminger
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
05 Feb, 2013
1 commit
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We recently refactored the driver source, this patch will take care of
updating copyright date and adding it to newly added files.Signed-off-by: Jitendra Kalsaria
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
27 Jan, 2013
1 commit
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Pablo Neira Ayuso says:
====================
This batch contains netfilter updates for you net-next tree, they are:* The new connlabel extension for x_tables, that allows us to attach
labels to each conntrack flow. The kernel implementation uses a
bitmask and there's a file in user-space that maps the bits with the
corresponding string for each existing label. By now, you can attach
up to 128 overlapping labels. From Florian Westphal.* A new round of improvements for the netns support for conntrack.
Gao feng has moved many of the initialization code of each module
of the netns init path. He also made several code refactoring, that
code looks cleaner to me now.* Added documentation for all possible tweaks for nf_conntrack via
sysctl, from Jiri Pirko.* Cisco 7941/7945 IP phone support for our SIP conntrack helper,
from Kevin Cernekee.* Missing header file in the snmp helper, from Stephen Hemminger.
* Finally, a couple of fixes to resolve minor issues with these
changes, from myself.
====================Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
23 Jan, 2013
2 commits
-
Paul Gortmaker says:
====================
The Ethernet-HowTo was maintained for roughly 10 years, from 1993 to 2003.
Fortunately sane hardware probing and auto detection (via PCI and ISA/PnP)
largely made the document a relic of the past, hence it being abandoned
a decade ago.However, there is one last useful thing that we can extract from the
effort made in maintaining that document. We can use it to guide us
with respect to what rare, experimental and/or super ancient 10Mbit
ISA drivers don't make sense to maintain in-tree anymore.Nobody will argue that ISA is obsolete. Availability went away at about
the time Pentium3 motherboards moved from 500MHz Slot1/SECC processors
to the green 500MHz Socket 370 Pentium3 chips, at the turn of the century.In theory, it is possible that someone could still be running one of these
12+ year old P3 machines and want 3.9+ bleeding edge kernels (but unlikely).
In light of the above (remote) possibility, we can defer the removal of some
ISA network drivers that were highly popular and well tested. Typically
that means the stuff more from the mid to late '90s, some with ISA PnP
support, like the 3c509, the wd/SMC 8390 based stuff, PCnet/lance etc.But a lot of other drivers, typically from the early 1990s were for rare
hardware, and experimental (to the point of requiring a cron job that would
do a test ping, and then ifconfig down/up and/or a rmmod/insmod!). And
some of these drivers (znet, and lp486e to name two) are physically tied
to platforms with on motherboard ethernet -- of 486 machines that date
from the early 1990s and can only have single digit amounts of memory.What I'd like to achieve here with this series, is to get rid of those old
drivers that are no longer being used. In an earlier discussion where
I'd proposed deleting a single driver, Alan suggested we instead dump
all the historical stuff in one go, to make it "...immediately obvious
where the break point is..."[1] and that it was "perfectly reasonable it
(and a pile of other ISA cards) ought to be shown the door"[2]. So that
is the goal here - make a clear line in the sand where the really ancient
stuff finally gets kicked to the curb.Two old parallel port drivers are considered for removal here as well,
since in early 386/486 ISA machines, the parallel port was typically found
with the UARTS on the multi-I/O ISA controller card. These drivers also date
from the early 1990's; parallel ports are no longer found on modern boards,
and their performance was not even capable of 10% of 10Mbit bandwidth.Allow me a preemptive justification against the inevitable comments from
well meaning bystanders who suggest "why not just leave all this alone?".
Dead drivers cost us all if they are left in tree. If you think that
is false, then please first consider:-every time you type "git status", you are checking to see if modifications
have been made by you to all that dead code.-every time you type "git grep " you are searching through files
which contain that dead code that simply does not interest you.-every time you build a "allyesconfig" and an "allmodconfig" (don't tell
me you skip this step before submitting your changes to a maintainer),
you waste CPU cycles building this dead code.-every time there is a tree wide API change, or cleanup, or file relocation,
we pay the cost of updating dead code, or moving dead code.-daily regression tests (take linux-next as the most transparent
example) spend time building (and possibly running) this dead code.-hard working people who regularly run auditing tools looking for lurking
bugs (sparse/coverity/smatch/coccinelle) are wasting time checking for,
and fixing bugs in this dead code.This last one is key. Please take a look at the git history for the
files that are proposed for removal here. Look at the git history for
any one of them ("git whatchanged --follow drivers/net/.../driver.c")
Mentally sort the changes into two bins -- (1) the robotic tree-wide
changes, and (2) the "look I found a real run-time bug while using this"
category. You will see that category #2 is essentially empty.Further to that, realize that drivers don't simply disappear. We are
not operating in the binary-only distribution space like other OS. All
these drivers remain in the git history forever. If a person is an
enthusiast for extreme legacy hardware, they are probably already
customizing their kernel source and building it themselves to support
such systems. Also keep in mind that they could still build the 3.8
kernel exactly as-is, and run it (or a 3.8.x stable variant of it) for
several more years if they were really determined to cling to these old
experimental ISA drivers for some reason.In summary, I hope that folks can be pragmatic about this, and not
get swept up in nostalgia. Ask yourself whether it is realistic to
expect a person would have a genuine use case where they would
need to build a 3.9+ modern kernel and install it on some legacy hardware
that has no option but to absolutely _require_ one of the drivers
that are deleted here.The following series was created with --irreversible-delete for
ease of review (it skips showing the content of files that are
deleted); however the complete patches can be pulled as per below.
====================Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
-
Since we have removed NCE (Neighbour Cache Entry) reference from
routing entries, the only refcnt holders of an NCE are its timer
(if running) and its owner table, in usual cases. As a result,
neigh_periodic_work() purges NCEs over and over again even for
gateways.It does not make sense to purge entries, if number of them is
very small, so keep them. The minimum number of entries to keep
is specified by gc_thresh1.Signed-off-by: YOSHIFUJI Hideaki
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller
22 Jan, 2013
3 commits
-
This is another one that makes sense to target for obsolescence, since
it (a)appeared pre-1995, and (b)was rather rare, and (c)did not
really have any statistically significant active linux user base.Removing this ISA 10Mbit driver support is unlikely to be even noticed
by the user base of 3.9+ linux kernels, especially when the documentation
clearly indicates the vintage with this text:"...designed to work with all kernels > 1.1.33"
Signed-off-by: Paul Gortmaker
-
These are old ISA 10Mbit cards from the 1st 1/2 of the 1990s and
required manual jumper settings in order to configure them. Here
we remove them on the premise that they are no longer used in any
modern 3.9+ kernels.Signed-off-by: Paul Gortmaker
-
The parallel port is largely replaced by USB, and even in the
day where these drivers were current, the documented speed was
less than 100kB/s. Let us not pretend that anyone cares about
these drivers anymore, or worse - pretend that anyone is using
them on a modern kernel.As a side bonus, this is the end of legacy parallel port ethernet,
so we get to drop the whole chunk relating to that in the legacy
Space.c file containing the non-PCI unified probe dispatch.Signed-off-by: Paul Gortmaker
