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authorHaojie Li <lihaojie@kylinos.cn>2026-08-25 18:08:45 +0800
committerChun-Kuang Hu <chunkuang.hu@kernel.org>2026-09-28 23:20:55 +0000
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tree0b735b7b4a27369cb4d75d9431b3ee59ce7e5bcc /Documentation/networking/tcp-thin.rst
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drm/mediatek: Add missing IS_ERR check for ovl_adaptor platform devicegrafted
platform_device_register_data() can fail and return an ERR_PTR, but the return value is used without checking, leading to an invalid pointer being stored in ddp_comp[].dev and passed to component_match_add() and mtk_ddp_comp_init(), which could result in a kernel crash. Add an IS_ERR() check to jump to the error handling path on failure. Fixes: 0d9eee9118b7 ("drm/mediatek: Add drm ovl_adaptor sub driver for MT8195") Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org Signed-off-by: Haojie Li <lihaojie@kylinos.cn> Reviewed-by: CK Hu <ck.hu@mediatek.com> Link: https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-mediatek/patch/20260825100845.438893-1-lihaojie@kylinos.cn/ Signed-off-by: Chun-Kuang Hu <chunkuang.hu@kernel.org>
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+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+====================
+Thin-streams and TCP
+====================
+
+A wide range of Internet-based services that use reliable transport
+protocols display what we call thin-stream properties. This means
+that the application sends data with such a low rate that the
+retransmission mechanisms of the transport protocol are not fully
+effective. In time-dependent scenarios (like online games, control
+systems, stock trading etc.) where the user experience depends
+on the data delivery latency, packet loss can be devastating for
+the service quality. Extreme latencies are caused by TCP's
+dependency on the arrival of new data from the application to trigger
+retransmissions effectively through fast retransmit instead of
+waiting for long timeouts.
+
+After analysing a large number of time-dependent interactive
+applications, we have seen that they often produce thin streams
+and also stay with this traffic pattern throughout its entire
+lifespan. The combination of time-dependency and the fact that the
+streams provoke high latencies when using TCP is unfortunate.
+
+In order to reduce application-layer latency when packets are lost,
+a set of mechanisms has been made, which address these latency issues
+for thin streams. In short, if the kernel detects a thin stream,
+the retransmission mechanisms are modified in the following manner:
+
+1) If the stream is thin, fast retransmit on the first dupACK.
+2) If the stream is thin, do not apply exponential backoff.
+
+These enhancements are applied only if the stream is detected as
+thin. This is accomplished by defining a threshold for the number
+of packets in flight. If there are less than 4 packets in flight,
+fast retransmissions can not be triggered, and the stream is prone
+to experience high retransmission latencies.
+
+Since these mechanisms are targeted at time-dependent applications,
+they must be specifically activated by the application using the
+TCP_THIN_LINEAR_TIMEOUTS and TCP_THIN_DUPACK IOCTLS or the
+tcp_thin_linear_timeouts and tcp_thin_dupack sysctls. Both
+modifications are turned off by default.
+
+References
+==========
+More information on the modifications, as well as a wide range of
+experimental data can be found here:
+
+"Improving latency for interactive, thin-stream applications over
+reliable transport"
+http://simula.no/research/nd/publications/Simula.nd.477/simula_pdf_file