[Bloat] Random idea in reaction to all the discussion of TCP flavours - timestamps?

[Jonathan Morton]

On 16 Mar, 2011, at 12:36 am, Rick Jones wrote:

> Back and forth synchronization between driver and device is
> doubleplusungood.  Being able to remove a packet on the tx queue already
> made known to the NIC sounds like it could become a rathole. If you are
> lucky, you *might* have a "valid/invalid" bit in a packet descriptor
> that the driver could hope to set before the NIC had pulled-in a copy
> across the I/O bus.

Since this would be on the order of a second after submission, this seems unlikely then.

The even better solution would be if the hardware timed-out an old packet by itself after about 1 second.  Does this happen already?  If not, can it?

 - Jonathan