Re: net-AIO and real-time TCP (blue sky research)

[Werner Almesberger <werner@almesberger.net>]

Sridhar Samudrala wrote:
> Your AIO-TCP looks pretty similar to the partial reliablity extension to
> SCTP that allows an SCTP endpoint to signal to its peer that it is no longer
> going to retransmit certain messages and should skip past those messages.

Damn, so it's not such a crazy idea after all :-)

Something like this would be useful for the sender side, if the
receiver can't figure out on its own that it shouldn't wait for
the data to arrive. (And, assuming that the sender skips data by
leaving a gap, not by filling it with other data, which seems
like a reasonable assumption if we use AIO-TCP at both ends. If
the receiver may use regular TCP, the sender would have to try
to fill the missing part, which can be hairy, particularly if
some of the data-to-be-dropped has already be sent.)

Clearly, any such thing on the sender side would need to have some
means to detect that the receiver can recover from segments that
are never sent.

Is a concrete API for this functionality described somewhere ?
(I only skimmed through the RFC, but the API mentioned there
looks more like an abstract one.)

I like the term "partial reliability" :)

Thanks,
- Werner

-- 
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 / Werner Almesberger, Buenos Aires, Argentina     werner@almesberger.net /
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