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  • Stephen Warren's avatar
    net: BOOTP retry timeout improvements · f59be6e8
    Stephen Warren authored
    
    
    Currently, the BOOTP code sends out its initial request as soon as the
    Ethernet driver indicates "link up". If this packet is lost or not
    replied to for some reason, the code waits for a 1s timeout before
    retrying. For some reason, such early packets are often lost on my
    system, so this causes an annoying delay.
    
    To optimize this, modify the BOOTP code to have very short timeouts for
    the first packet transmitted, but gradually increase the timeout each
    time a timeout occurs. This way, if the first packet is lost, the second
    packet is transmitted quite quickly and hence the overall delay is low.
    However, if there's still no response, we don't keep spewing out packets
    at an insane speed.
    
    It's arguably more correct to try and find out why the first packet is
    lost. However, it seems to disappear inside my Ethenet chip; the TX chip
    indicates no error during TX (not that it has much in the way of
    reporting...), yet wireshark on the RX side doesn't see any packet.
    FWIW, I'm using an ASIX USB Ethernet adapter. Perhaps "link up" is
    reported too early or based on the wrong condition in HW, and we should
    add some fixed extra delay into the driver. However, this would slow down
    every link up event even if it ends up not being needed in some cases.
    Having BOOTP retry quickly applies the fix/WAR to every possible
    Ethernet device, and is quite simple to implement, so seems a better
    solution.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarStephen Warren <swarren@nvidia.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarJoe Hershberger <joe.hershberger@ni.com>
    f59be6e8