Nothing really interesting these evening - just the usual hacking session. Linus is back from vacation and pent-up patches should be soaked up the next days. Eric submitted one patch after the other and the comment of Davem take the biscuit: "Slow down Eric, you're on fire :-)".

Mathieu Lacage - let's call him the ns-3 main developer ;-) - posted a patch where he fixed a uninitialized memory access, spotted by valgrind.

By the way: you cannot use valgrind directly to spot failures in the network stack/kernel. Mathieu use the Network Simulation Cradle (NSC) to execute the Linux Network Stack on top of ns-3. With this combination it is possible to use valgrind to spot some errors. Florian already spotted some errors triggered by valgrind ~2 years ago where he ported nsc to ns-3.

The posted patch was not really perfect because tcp_check_req() calls tcp_parse_options() only to update the timestamp indication (@saw_tstamp@). The valdgrind message is triggered by a uninitialized @opt_rx->user_mss@ which is not used here. Eric's patch tried to fix it and Davem replied:

> -     struct tcp_options_received tmp_opt;
> +     struct tcp_options_received tmp_opt = {0};
>       u8 *hash_location;
>       struct sock *child;

That's a 28 byte memset() in the connect fast-path.  We shouldn't eat this
just to placate a valgrind miscue. :-)

:-)