[Ecn-sane] [tsvwg] Comments on L4S drafts

[Bob Briscoe]

Sebastien,

On 21/07/2019 17:08, Sebastian Moeller wrote:
> Hi Bob,
>
>
>> On Jul 21, 2019, at 14:30, Bob Briscoe <ietf at bobbriscoe.net> wrote:
>>
>> David,
>>
>> On 19/07/2019 21:06, Black, David wrote:
>>> Two comments as an individual, not as a WG chair:
>>>
>>>> Mostly, they're things that an end-host algorithm needs
>>>> to do in order to behave nicely, that might be good things anyways
>>>> without regard to L4S in the network (coexist w/ Reno, avoid RTT bias,
>>>> work well w/ small RTT, be robust to reordering).  I am curious which
>>>> ones you think are too rigid ... maybe they can be loosened?
>>> [1] I have profoundly objected to L4S's RACK-like requirement (use time to detect loss, and in particular do not use 3DupACK) in public on multiple occasions, because in reliable transport space, that forces use of TCP Prague, a protocol with which we have little to no deployment or operational experience.  Moreover, that requirement raises the bar for other protocols in a fashion that impacts endpoint firmware, and possibly hardware in some important (IMHO) environments where investing in those changes delivers little to no benefit.  The environments that I have in mind include a lot of data centers.  Process wise, I'm ok with addressing this objection via some sort of "controlled environment" escape clause text that makes this RACK-like requirement inapplicable in a "controlled environment" that does not need that behavior (e.g., where 3DupACK does not cause problems and is not expected to cause problems).
>>>
>>> For clarity, I understand the multi-lane link design rationale behind the RACK-like requirement and would agree with that requirement in a perfect world ... BUT ... this world is not perfect ... e.g., 3DupACK will not vanish from "running code" anytime soon.
>> As you know, we have been at pains to address every concern about L4S that has come up over the years, and I thought we had addressed this one to your satisfaction.
>>
>> The reliable transports you are are concerned about require ordered delivery by the underlying fabric, so they can only ever exist in a controlled environment. In such a controlled environment, your ECT1+DSCP idea (below) could be used to isolate the L4S experiment from these transports and their firmware/hardware constraints.
>>
>> On the public Internet, the DSCP commonly gets wiped at the first hop. So requiring a DSCP as well as ECT1 to separate off L4S would serve no useful purpose: it would still lead to ECT1 packets without the DSCP sent from a scalable congestion controls (which is behind Jonathan's concern in response to you).
> 	And this is why IPv4's protocol fiel/ IPv6's next header field are the classifier you actually need... You are changing a significant portion of TCP's observable behavior, so it can be argued that TCP-Prague is TCP by name only; this "classifier" still lives in the IP header, so no deeper layer's need to be accessed, this is non-leaky in that the classifier is unambiguously present independent of the value of the ECN bits; and it is also compatible with an SCE style ECN signaling. Since I believe the most/only likely roll-out of L4S is going to be at the ISPs access nodes (BRAS/BNG/CMTS/whatever)  middleboxes shpould not be an unsurmountable problem, as ISPs controll their own middleboxes and often even the CPEs, so protocoll ossification is not going to be a showstopper for this part of the roll-out.
>
> Best Regards
> 	Sebastian
>
I think you've understood this from reading abbreviated description of 
the requirement on the list, rather than the spec. The spec. solely says:

	A scalable congestion control MUST detect loss by counting in time-based units

That's all. No more, no less.

People call this the "RACK requirement", purely because the idea came 
from RACK. There is no requirement to do RACK, and the requirement 
applies to all transports, not just TCP.

It then means that a packet with ECT1 in the IP field can be forwarded 
without resequencing (no requirement - it just it /can/ be). This is a 
network layer 'unordered delivery' property, so it's appropriate to flag 
at the IP layer.




Bob



-- 
________________________________________________________________
Bob Briscoe                               http://bobbriscoe.net/

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