[e2e] Are we doing sliding window in the Internet?

[Lloyd Wood]

This issue is minor compared to the widespread changes to their TCP stack Microsoft made with adopting Compound TCP in Vista.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/columns/cableguy/cg1105.mspx

and the IETF didn't have any say in that either. Standards bodies don't ship code.

At Wednesday 03/01/2007 22:59 -0500, Agarwal, Anil wrote:
> 
>Joe Touch wrote :
>
>>> Do these semantic wranglings actually have a point?
>
>> The question is "under what conditions is it permissible to override a
>> SHOULD". I would hope that would be clarified in an update to 2119, but
>> don't know what the state of that doc is...
>
>1. The technical issue in question is QuickAck, where delayed acks are not used for the first R / 2 bytes of received data, where R seems to be the receive socket buffer size
>2. QuickAck is enabled in Linux, by default. There is no procedure to disable it, except temporarily, for an application via a system call.
>3. Linux supports many other "non-standard" TCP features, but most/all of them seem to be disabled by default.
>4. There does not seem to be a whole lot of technical documentation on the feature, except for the Linux man page. It is not clear how this feature gets turned on and off during the life of a connection.  There is no RFC on the subject.
>5. It seems to violate a "SHOULD" statement in the RFCs. 
>6. It's objective is certainly not nefarious. It improves performance for individual short data transfers. Perhaps the SHOULD needs to be changed with some qualifications. But that requires an open discussion.
> 
>It is perhaps understandable that SHOULDs and even MUSTs can be violated in controlled experimental environments (e.g., simulations).
>It is perhaps understandable that SHOULDs may be violated in controlled , isolated environments (e.g., satellite networks).
>It may be unavoidable that a SHOULD or MUST is violated by a "hacker" and  used over over the Internet.
>But under what circumstances should a SHOULD be violated and let loose over the Internet as part of a widely used OS?
> 
>One would like to think that the last category should require some care and a rigorous process. Is this process not documented or well understood? Surely, it cannot be - implement, deploy, publish paper and write RFC :). What role should the IETF play in this process? Advisory only?
> 
>Anil
>-----
>Anil Agarwal
>ViaSat Inc.
>