>> You are not dropping packets.  You are returning ENOBUFS to the
>> application, and you are giving it a chance to retry.
> How does the return value affect the app's chance to retry?

Because if the application can't tell a dropped-packet return from a
normal-send return, it can't know when to retry.

> It can just as well retry if you return 0.

Yes.  But as I understand it that was not on the table; all the
proposals for getting rid of ENOBUFS returns to userland were either by
sleeping for space (throttling back) and thus doing normal sends as far
as the userland call goes, or for *silently* dropping the packet at a
low level and thus making it look to userland as though the send
completed entirely normally.

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