Subject: TCP fast open question

From: Zheng Liu <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2014 19:58:23 +0800

Hi all,

Now we are trying to use TCP fast open in our nginx server, and we
encounter a problem under non-blocking socket.  I appreciate if some one
can reply this question.  Thanks in advance.

I describe our question here.  we have two machines, one is as server and
another is as client.  'net.ipv4.tcp_fastopen' on both of them are set to
3.  The server program looks like below:

  ... 
  listenfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
  bind(listenfd, (struct sockaddr *)&servaddr, sizeof(servaddr));
  int tfo_opt = 1;
  setsockopt(listenfd, SOL_TCP, TCP_LISTEN_INFO, &tfo_opt, sizeof(tfo_opt));
  listen(listenfd, 5);
  connfd = accept(listenfd, (struct sockaddr *)NULL, NULL);
  recv(connfd, &buf, 4096)
  ...

The client program:

  ...
  sockfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
  fcntl(sockfd, F_SETFL, fcntl(sockfd, F_GETFL, 0)|O_NONBLOCK);
  sendto(sockfd, msg, strlen(msg), MSG_FASTOPEN,
  	(struct sockaddr *)&servaddr, sizeof(servaddr);
  recv(sockfd, buf, 4096, 0);
  ...

We use a non-blocking socket to connect the server and send some
messages.  After calling sendto(2) we always get an EINPROGRESS error.
We think it is reasonable because connect(2) could also return this
error with a non-blocking socket and the connection will be established
later.  The question is *whether or not the data will be sent* after the
connection is established.  If I understand correctly, sendto(2) will
return the number of bytes of data queued up in the kernel or sent in
the SYN packet.  Even though the EINPROGRESS is returned.  If sendto(2)
returns -1, that means that no data is queued up in kernel or sent in
the packet.  Please correct me if I miss-understand something.

We run the program in our testing environment, and we use tcpdump(1) to
capture the packets.  From the result we can see there is no any data
that is sent.  Then we do another testing that after calling sendto(2)
the client program will sleep for 5 seconds and then call send(2) to
transfer some data.

  $ ./client xx.xx.xx.xx
  ret -1 errno 115

The program works well.  So that means that after getting a EINPROGRESS
error, the program must call send(2) manually.  Is it correct?  If we
want to avoid this problem, we need to set 'net.ipv4.tcp_fastopen' to
0x707 ?

Regards,
						- Zheng