[LARTC] 2 Questions on filtering incoming stuff

[Ed Wildgoose <lists@wildgooses.com>]

Two easy questions after having read the LARTC HOWTO document (which by 
the way is a *fantastic* document.  Congratulations to all who contributed!)

First is: Can I prioritise my "drops" on incoming traffic when the link 
is overloaded.  ie instead of just tail dropping, can I "prefer" to drop 
certain classes of traffic?  If so, do I do this by setting up, say, a 
HTB tree like on the incoming, but the only action at the leaf is to drop?

Second: Theoretically now....  There appears to be no way to tweak 
"window length" to throttle incoming data... But in theory, would a 
module which delayed the outgoing ACK's have the same effect?  Obviously 
this module would need some sort of packet accounting ffrom the incoming 
interface in order to supply the outgoing filter with the info it needed 
(not even sure if this design makes it hard to implement such a 
thing?).  Fast and selective acks and timeouts, obviously make this very 
hard to implement as well...

However, the main point is that I don't really understand the process by 
which linux (and other OSs) discover the steady state speed of a link?  
Anyone got a good pointer to how "slow start" and "fast start" work, and 
how it adjusts speed through time? 

Thanks

Ed W
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