[Bloat] Announcing CeroWrt RC6 (beta) test.

Jim Gettys jg at freedesktop.org
Thu Aug 18 14:02:24 EDT 2011 

The list has been entirely too quiet of late, what with summer vacations
and conferences.

On behalf of Dave Taht, who is busy conferencing today, I'm very happy
to announce the beta test of CeroWrt, which is a OpenWRT build
specifically for the Netgear WNDR3700v2.  While it is a beginning in
debloating a home router, it's also an attempt to put together a home
router that we'd actually like to use ourselves, with IPv6 and full DNS
and DNSSEC support (see below for details).

Note that we'd really appreciate people helping performance testing,
both relative to stock commercial firmware for the WNDR3700v2, and
testing latency under load; netperf along with many other performance
tools are included with CeroWrt.  Helping with automating such testing
would be a way people could be a big help.  While we think it should
outperform the what's out there, it's entirely possible some stupid bug
or knob twist could cause unintended performance problems; it would be
unfortunate to declare a first release of CeroWrt and find it worked
worse than commercial firmware. Bug
216http://www.bufferbloat.net/issues/216 is a good object lesson; far
from all problems people see in their 802.11 environment are due to
bufferbloat: device drivers can also be a major issue, with excessive
retry, particularly in the face of 802.11n aggregation becoming a
serious problem. It is also an object lesson as to why a fully open
platform is the only way to make progress on this problem; disentangling
bloat from other problems becomes a Gordian knot in a system that is closed.

                                                Dave and Jim



    CeroWrt RC5 is suitable for beta testing

/After a week of testing in the lab, we are delighted to report that the
last major bugs (#216 and #195) appear to be stomped in Cerowrt 1.0.
While our testing continues, we welcome other testers to download the
firmware and give the router a try!/


  About CeroWrt

CeroWrt is a project to resolve endemic problems in home networking
today, and to push the state of the art of edge networks and routers
forward. Projects include tighter integration with DNSSEC, wireless mesh
networking (Wisp6), measurements of networking and censorship issues
(BISMark), among others, notably reducing bufferbloat in both the wired
and wireless components of the stack.


  CeroWrt's Goals

CeroWrt is a build of the OpenWrt routing platform intended for use by
individuals, network engineers, researchers, teachers, and students
interested in advancing the state of the art on the Internet, and in
particular, those investigating the problems of latency under load,
bufferbloat, wireless-n, and the inter-relationships between various TCP
& QoS algorithms.

CeroWrt breaks with home router conventions in several ways. CeroWrt
comes with a high performance integral web server with which you can
establish local web services and provide web content and services 24x7.

First class name services become a necessity rather than a "nice to
have" with IPv6 deployment. Manual configuration of name services with
IPv4 and IPv6 literal addresses is no longer feasible by most people, if
indeed it ever was. Toward the goal of "plug and play" home environment
able to publish IPv6 addresses into the global Internet name space
without manual configuration, CeroWrt includes the Bind name server.
Security in the home environment is also a goal, ergo CeroWrt's support
for DNSSEC using ISC Bind in a chrooted jail.

A core goal for CeroWrt is to provide a well understood platform, where
contributors can perform tests with confidence that their results can be
duplicated by others.

CeroWrt is the base on which other specialised builds may be built in
the future. The default build is too big (~9MB) to be compatible with
more commonly available routers.

There are other features all intended to help make insight into
networking problems easier. In particular, bufferbloat, wherever we
could find it, has been reduced, but not yet eliminated entirely; that
requires the research in AQM and buffer management for which CeroWrt is
intended.


  Interesting features of this release:

Ocean City Release includes:

  * Extensive debloating
  * ISC Bind 9 with DNSSEC, running in a chroot jail
  * Numerous debugging and diagnostic tools
  * ECN is enabled
  * Multiple TCP algorithms (Cubic, Bic, Westwood+, Vegas)
  * Multiple traffic shapers (now including DRR and SFB)
  * Simulations are possible of packet loss and delay by using NETEM
  * Native, 6to4, and 6in4 IPv6 support
  * Mesh routing
  * The polipo web proxy
  * Local lighttpd Web Server
  * Rsync
  * Bridging different radios and ethernet has become very problematic,
    particularly in the face of multicast traffic and radically
    different wireless bandwidth. CeroWrt routes rather than bridges.
  * Many additional packages are not installed by default, but are
    available in the CeroWrt package repository.

While we have tried very hard to produce a usable web interface for the
normal use of CeroWrt as your primary Internet router (and do desire you
use it as such and give us feedback!), some things, such as
configuration of the web proxy, or alternate TCP algorithms can require
non-GUI editing via SSH.

As this is a research and development platform, there will be no long
term support for this release and future RCs will likely require a
complete reflashing and reconfiguration of your router. We apologize for
the inconvenience but the state of the art and the problems we are
trying to solve are rapidly moving targets that we must track closely.
We will feed back the results of this work into stable distributions.


  The Beta 1 "Ocean City" release (RC5)

CeroWrt is also aimed at (currently) a single hardware platform for
which fully open drivers are available: the Netgear WNDR3700v2, a
current 802.11abgn router using the Atheros AR7161 rev 2 with gigabit
Ethernet ports. CeroWrt runs on the WNDR3700v2 only as it requires more
than 8Mbytes of flash. Note that there may still be WNDR3700v1's in the
retail channel. Information on distinguishing them can be found in the
bufferbloat wiki
at http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bismark/wiki/Wndr3700v2

The Ocean City release is based on Linux 2.6.39.4; the DNS server is ISC
Bind 9.8.0-P4 running from xinetd and in a chroot jail. RC5 is based on
OpenWrt head of development as of commit
65dea0f0b144abbeb445c9d24a605aba506678a0, Thu Aug 11 13:52:40 2011 +0000.

Systematic testing of this software has just begun and the performance
of the router is at this date unknown relative to other firmware.

Release candidate firmware can be downloaded from:

http://huchra.bufferbloat.net/~cero1/
<http://huchra.bufferbloat.net/%7Ecero1/>

Installation directions can be found at:
http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/cerowrt/wiki/OCEAN_CITY_INSTALLATION_GUIDE

Release notes are at:
http://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/cerowrt/wiki/OCEAN_CITY_RELEASE_NOTES
IRC discussions on CeroWrt take place at irc.freenode.net: #bufferbloat
IRC discussions on OpenWrt in general take place on:irc.freenode.net:
#openwrt

Mailing lists:

General discussion about CeroWrt takes place on the bloat-devel list
found at:
https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/bloat-devel

General bufferbloat discussions can be found at:
https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/bloat

Thanks for giving CeroWrt a try!

The network you save may be your own.


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