net: allow setting ecn via routing table

This patch allows to set ECN on a per-route basis in case the sysctl
tcp_ecn is not set to 1. In other words, when ECN is set for specific
routes, it provides a tcp_ecn=1 behaviour for that route while the rest
of the stack acts according to the global settings.

One can use 'ip route change dev $dev $net features ecn' to toggle this.

Having a more fine-grained per-route setting can be beneficial for various
reasons, for example, 1) within data centers, or 2) local ISPs may deploy
ECN support for their own video/streaming services [1], etc.

There was a recent measurement study/paper [2] which scanned the Alexa's
publicly available top million websites list from a vantage point in US,
Europe and Asia:

Half of the Alexa list will now happily use ECN (tcp_ecn=2, most likely
blamed to commit 255cac91c3 ("tcp: extend ECN sysctl to allow server-side
only ECN") ;)); the break in connectivity on-path was found is about
1 in 10,000 cases. Timeouts rather than receiving back RSTs were much
more common in the negotiation phase (and mostly seen in the Alexa
middle band, ranks around 50k-150k): from 12-thousand hosts on which
there _may_ be ECN-linked connection failures, only 79 failed with RST
when _not_ failing with RST when ECN is not requested.

It's unclear though, how much equipment in the wild actually marks CE
when buffers start to fill up.

We thought about a fallback to non-ECN for retransmitted SYNs as another
global option (which could perhaps one day be made default), but as Eric
points out, there's much more work needed to detect broken middleboxes.

Two examples Eric mentioned are buggy firewalls that accept only a single
SYN per flow, and middleboxes that successfully let an ECN flow establish,
but later mark CE for all packets (so cwnd converges to 1).

 [1] http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/89/slides/slides-89-tsvarea-1.pdf, p.15
 [2] http://ecn.ethz.ch/

Joint work with Daniel Borkmann.

Reference: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.network/335797
Suggested-by: Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@stressinduktion.org>
Acked-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Daniel Borkmann <dborkman@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Florian Westphal <fw@strlen.de>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>

1 files changed, 11 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/net/ipv4/tcp_output.c b/net/ipv4/tcp_output.c
index a3d453b..0b88158 100644
--- a/net/ipv4/tcp_output.c
+++ b/net/ipv4/tcp_output.c
@@ -333,10 +333,19 @@ static void tcp_ecn_send_synack(struct sock *sk, struct sk_buff *skb)
 static void tcp_ecn_send_syn(struct sock *sk, struct sk_buff *skb)
 {
 	struct tcp_sock *tp = tcp_sk(sk);
+	bool use_ecn = sock_net(sk)->ipv4.sysctl_tcp_ecn == 1 ||
+		       tcp_ca_needs_ecn(sk);
+
+	if (!use_ecn) {
+		const struct dst_entry *dst = __sk_dst_get(sk);
+
+		if (dst && dst_feature(dst, RTAX_FEATURE_ECN))
+			use_ecn = true;
+	}
 
 	tp->ecn_flags = 0;
-	if (sock_net(sk)->ipv4.sysctl_tcp_ecn == 1 ||
-	    tcp_ca_needs_ecn(sk)) {
+
+	if (use_ecn) {
 		TCP_SKB_CB(skb)->tcp_flags |= TCPHDR_ECE | TCPHDR_CWR;
 		tp->ecn_flags = TCP_ECN_OK;
 		if (tcp_ca_needs_ecn(sk))