Every non-coalesceable in-flow packet evicted the flow's open slot, so
a bidirectional connection's inbound data run was broken by each peer
ACK interleaved into it, largely defeating coalescing on concurrent
upload+download. A bare acknowledgment (zero payload, nothing beyond
ACK|PSH|ECE) carries no ordering obligation toward the flow's data --
delivered late it is just a stale ACK the receiver ignores -- so it
can ride the lane as a passthrough without the evict, same as kernel
GRO, which doesn't flush held data on pure ACKs. SYN/FIN/RST/CWR keep
sealing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014ugV2edVqoz3tBvq9J6yWp
A slot that stays single-segment is byte-identical to the packet it
was seeded from, but flushSlot re-emitted it via WriteGSO with a
seeded pseudo-sum, forcing the kernel to software-checksum up to
~1400B that arrived with a perfectly valid checksum. Keep the borrowed
seed packet on the slot (valid until Flush per the Commit contract)
and emit it through the plain DATA_VALID path when numSeg is still 1
at flush time. appendPayload and mergeSlots only touch hdrBuf once
numSeg >= 2, so the raw bytes are pristine whenever the fast path
fires. This is every non-coalesced TCP/UDP packet: request/response
flows, many-flow fan-in, and each run's leftover tail.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014ugV2edVqoz3tBvq9J6yWp
JackDoan