Re: [PATCH v2 0/4] Reworks and improvements to TCP activity timers

[Stefano Brivio <sbrivio@redhat.com>]

On Fri,  6 Feb 2026 17:17:35 +1100
David Gibson <david@gibson.dropbear.id.au> wrote:

> Here's a bunch of patches aimed at fixing bug 179, and reworking the
> currently broken inactivity timer along the way.
> 
> I believe patches 1..2/4 are ready to go - I've tested them, and I'm
> happy with how they're behaving.  Patches 3..4/4 I think are correct,
> but I've been getting bogged down in details trying to test them in
> the specific FIN_WAIT_2 situation that occurs in bug 179.

I just tested things manually by cycling guest interfaces and checking
that keepalives come and eventually cause connection resets, as well as
that the activity timeout (shortened via define) triggers after the
expected time.

It's not great but I couldn't figure out a way to simulate the issue
with a single namespace test (without any connecting interface that can
be brought down), and simulating this with multiple namespaces
connected via veth looks doable, but not easy to integrate with the
existing tests.

Meanwhile the reporter of https://bugs.passt.top/show_bug.cgi?id=179
confirms this series solves the issue, and delaying this further
doesn't sound like a good idea, so I went ahead and finally applied
this, fixing a trivial conflict with 812cdb802c6e ("tcp: Move tap
header update out of tcp_fill_headers()") on the way.

-- 
Stefano