Subject: IGMP Unsolicited Report Interval too long for IGMPv3?

From: William Manley <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2013 21:43:57 +0100

If an IGMP join packet is lost you will not receive data sent to the 
multicast group so if no data arrives from that multicast group in a 
period of time after the IGMP join a second IGMP join will be sent.  The 
delay between joins is the "IGMP Unsolicited Report Interval".

In the kernel this seems to be hard coded to be chosen randomly between 
0-10s.  In our use-case (IPTV) this is too long as it can cause channel 
change to be slow in the presence of packet loss.

I would guess that this 10s has come from IGMPv2 RFC2236, which was 
reduced to 1s in IGMPv3 RFC3376.

There was a thread about this on linux-rdma in 2010 in the context of IP 
over Infiniband but it seems no patches got applied as a result of the 
discussion:

http://www.mail-archive.com/[email-masked]/msg05740.html

Would the right patch reducing the unsolicited report interval for 
IGMPv3 be acceptable now?

Thanks

Will