Interesting error while running packetdrill scripts

Recently, I came across an error when I ran packetdrill scripts against my TUN device. The error was that there was a conflict in the scripts expected packet and the packet which was actually sniffed during the run. Something like this -

inbound injected packet:  0.100024 S 0:0(0) win 32792 <mss 1460,sackOK,nop,nop,nop,wscale 7>
outbound sniffed packet:  0.100133 S. 389822580:389822580(0) ack 1 win 29200 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK,nop,wscale 7>
tests/linux/close/close-read-data-fin.pkt:11: error handling packet: bad outbound TCP options
script packet:  0.100000 S. 0:0(0) ack 1 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK,nop,wscale 6>
actual packet:  0.100133 S. 0:0(0) ack 1 win 29200 <mss 1460,nop,nop,sackOK,nop,wscale 7>

As it can be noticed, the wscale options in the script packet and the actual packet are different.
On doing a little research and visiting mailing lists, I finally found out the source of the error. It turns out that with TCP, the wscale and receive window behavior depends on the kernel implementation and configurations. The following sysctls are responsible for controlling the behavior in Linux -

sysctl net.core.rmem_max
sysctl net.ipv4.tcp_rmem

Hence, either we can change the scripts to match the expected behavior or we can change the kernel configurations to match the script requirements.
It’s better that we don’t drift off the default configurations.