[Cerowrt-devel] gaming routers...

[Cerowrt-devel] gaming routers...

[Dave Taht]

My guess is, of course, that this is some snoopy set of optimizations,
but who knows,
perhaps they were paying attention to fq_codel...

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/01/linksyss-new-router-puts-video-games-first/

-- 
Dave Täht
Let's go make home routers and wifi faster! With better software!
http://blog.cerowrt.org

Re: [Cerowrt-devel] gaming routers...

[Aaron Wood]

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"but it has revealed that the WRT32X is designed to automatically detect
computers using the Killer-line of network adapters
<http://www.killernetworking.com/>, indicating it's probably a
gaming-focused PC from a company like Alienware, MSI, or Razer that
requires priority access to the home's internet. It does the same thing for
an Xbox as well, if console gaming is more your thing."

Or it's looking at the mac ids of the devices, and queuing them separately,
with higher priority, but throttled to a percentage of overall bandwidth.
Much like the Cisco recommendations for voip traffic using EF.

-Aaron

On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 1:37 PM, Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com> wrote:

> My guess is, of course, that this is some snoopy set of optimizations,
> but who knows,
> perhaps they were paying attention to fq_codel...
>
> http://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/01/linksyss-new-router-puts-
> video-games-first/
>
> --
> Dave Täht
> Let's go make home routers and wifi faster! With better software!
> http://blog.cerowrt.org
> _______________________________________________
> Cerowrt-devel mailing list
> Cerowrt-devel@lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
>

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Re: [Cerowrt-devel] gaming routers...

[Jonathan Morton]

> On 4 Jan, 2017, at 23:45, Aaron Wood <woody77@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> "but it has revealed that the WRT32X is designed to automatically detect computers using the Killer-line of network adapters, indicating it's probably a gaming-focused PC from a company like Alienware, MSI, or Razer that requires priority access to the home's internet. It does the same thing for an Xbox as well, if console gaming is more your thing.”

In other words, they’re aware of the (user level) problem, but they still don’t really “get it” at a technical solution level.  And they call it “secret sauce” and hide the details, because they don’t want competitors to copy them.

> Or it's looking at the mac ids of the devices, and queuing them separately, with higher priority, but throttled to a percentage of overall bandwidth.  Much like the Cisco recommendations for voip traffic using EF.

It’s looking at MACs all right, but not the way you suggest.  It’s just classifying certain vendor IDs as “voice” by default, and leaving the rest at “best effort”.

It would however be very interesting to see whether we can measure the differences between this approach and the ath9k work - purely to illuminate whether the proprietary or open-source approaches are more effective in practice.

 - Jonathan Morton

Re: [Cerowrt-devel] gaming routers...

[Aaron Wood]

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'It’s looking at MACs all right, but not the way you suggest. It’s just
classifying certain vendor IDs as “voice” by default, and leaving the rest
at “best effort”.'

That's what I meant to imply, using the vendor I'd of the mac to separate
the traffic, reusing the "voice" QoS handling.

-Aaron
On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 13:57 Jonathan Morton <chromatix99@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> > On 4 Jan, 2017, at 23:45, Aaron Wood <woody77@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > "but it has revealed that the WRT32X is designed to automatically detect
> computers using the Killer-line of network adapters, indicating it's
> probably a gaming-focused PC from a company like Alienware, MSI, or Razer
> that requires priority access to the home's internet. It does the same
> thing for an Xbox as well, if console gaming is more your thing.”
>
> In other words, they’re aware of the (user level) problem, but they still
> don’t really “get it” at a technical solution level.  And they call it
> “secret sauce” and hide the details, because they don’t want competitors to
> copy them.
>
> > Or it's looking at the mac ids of the devices, and queuing them
> separately, with higher priority, but throttled to a percentage of overall
> bandwidth.  Much like the Cisco recommendations for voip traffic using EF.
>
> It’s looking at MACs all right, but not the way you suggest.  It’s just
> classifying certain vendor IDs as “voice” by default, and leaving the rest
> at “best effort”.
>
> It would however be very interesting to see whether we can measure the
> differences between this approach and the ath9k work - purely to illuminate
> whether the proprietary or open-source approaches are more effective in
> practice.
>
>  - Jonathan Morton
>
>

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Re: [Cerowrt-devel] gaming routers...

[Toke Høiland-Jørgensen]

Jonathan Morton <chromatix99@gmail.com> writes:

>> On 4 Jan, 2017, at 23:45, Aaron Wood <woody77@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> "but it has revealed that the WRT32X is designed to automatically detect
>> computers using the Killer-line of network adapters, indicating it's probably
>> a gaming-focused PC from a company like Alienware, MSI, or Razer that requires
>> priority access to the home's internet. It does the same thing for an Xbox as
>> well, if console gaming is more your thing.”
>
> In other words, they’re aware of the (user level) problem, but they still don’t
> really “get it” at a technical solution level. And they call it “secret sauce”
> and hide the details, because they don’t want competitors to copy them.
>
>> Or it's looking at the mac ids of the devices, and queuing them separately,
>> with higher priority, but throttled to a percentage of overall bandwidth. Much
>> like the Cisco recommendations for voip traffic using EF.
>
> It’s looking at MACs all right, but not the way you suggest.  It’s just classifying certain vendor IDs as “voice” by default, and leaving the rest at “best effort”.
>
> It would however be very interesting to see whether we can measure the
> differences between this approach and the ath9k work - purely to illuminate
> whether the proprietary or open-source approaches are more effective in
> practice.

We did get some results comparing using the VO queue with the FQ-CoDel
MAC layer changes for the WiFi bufferbloat work. We used synthetic MOS
values as the metric for this (which I'm not sure if anyone actually
puts any trust in), but we did see that fixing the queueing gave us
*better* performance than we got using the VO queue before the fixes.

Post fixes, the VO queue still gives slightly better performance than
BE, but the difference is only slightly above the noise level.

-Toke