We've had this discussion multiple times.
- You do not need FQ everywhere and depending on
the case you can do approximations of that.
- What I believe you always need is flow-awareness.
- There are already implementations of dual-queue systems in DC switches such as the Cisco nexus 9k.
- The dualQ system in docsis is the wrong way to implement a flow-aware system with two queues.
For many reasons including, but not limited to the fact that dualQ to work makes assumptions about the behaviour of the end-points.
A flow aware queuing system should not be sensitive to some sort of compliancy of the end-points.
You cannot trust the end-points and the protection system should not discriminate good vs bad based on a badge carried by the packets.
- I also believe dualQ fails to achieve its goal under current and future traffic patters.
- The approach described in this paper also works for 2 queues only and makes no assumption about the end-points.
It does not require marking at all.
James Roberts et al.
Minimizing the overhead in implementing flow-aware networking.
In Proceedings of the 2005 ACM symposium on Architecture for networking and communications systems (ANCS '05).
- There is not one TCP, there is no one single transport in the wild. There are many and there will be many more.
The docsis specs makes the assumption that to be a good guy you must be part of one Church. The one specified.
This is a very religious assumption about end-points' behaviour.
All the others are bad guys. I'm the only one who sees this as deeply wrong?
- Almost 10 years ago I built a FQ prototype on an NPU based on Cavium with Alcatel-Lucent (the team was based in Paris).
That was supposed to be an ALU7750 target. The problem was that not a single ISP was even aware of the topic. Nobody was asking for it.
It's a chicken and egg problem Mikael. If you do not ask loudly nobody builds it.
- I also built with Ikanos in 2010, a FQ prototype in their MIPS based SoC. 32 queues for the France Telecom livebox
and it worked. Ikanos was later acquired by Qualcomm and that SoC is not used anymore in favour of Broadcom.
Hope this helps to make progress in the discussion
Luca