sendmmsg already batches syscalls but still builds one sk_buff per datagram —
the kernel-side wall above ~1 Gbps. UDP Generic Segmentation Offload hands the
kernel one big buffer it splits into gso_size datagrams, building ~1 GSO skb per
≤64 segments. Research (LWN/Cloudflare/Tailscale) measures ~2.4x throughput at
equal CPU and 17-44x fewer syscalls, and that sendmmsg batching alone is
insufficient — you need true segmentation offload.
Adds Transport::send_gso (default = send_batch) + a UdpTransport Linux override:
coalesces a frame's equal-size wire packets (shards are zero-padded to a constant
size, so a whole frame is one gso_size) into ≤64-segment sendmsg(UDP_SEGMENT)
calls. seal/send routes through it. Opt-in via PUNKTFUNK_GSO (new unsafe hot-path
code) with automatic fallback to sendmmsg on any GSO error (unsupported kernel/
path), latched per process. Loopback unit test validates the cmsg segmentation;
full session over loopback streams clean (0% loss). Linux-only; loopback/non-Linux
keep sendmmsg/scalar.
Next levers: in-place AES-GCM seal (kill per-packet allocs), UDP GRO on recv,
drop the sleep-pacing in favor of the kernel qdisc, jumbo MTU.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
enricobuehler
6a630e919c