[Bloat] Kirkwood BQL?

[David Lang]

On Wed, 29 Jul 2015, Alan Jenkins wrote:

> On 29/07/15 12:24, Alan Jenkins wrote:
>> On 29/07/15 05:32, Rosen Penev wrote:
>>> Anyone know what the situation is with kirkwood and BQL? I found a
>>> patch for it but have no idea if there are any issues.
>>> 
>>> I have such a system but have no idea how to ascertain the efficacy of 
>>> BQL.
>> 
>> To the latter:
>> 
>> BQL works for transmissions that reach the full line rate (e.g. for 1000MB 
>> ethernet).  It limits the queue that builds in the driver/device to the 
>> minimum they need.  Then queue mostly builds in the generic networking 
>> stack, where it can be managed effectively e.g. by fq_codel.
>> 
>> So a simple efficacy test is to run a transmission at full speed, and 
>> monitor latency (ping) at the same time.  Just make sure the device qdisc 
>> is set to fq_codel.  fq_codel effectively prioritizes ping, so the 
>> difference will be very easy to see.
>> 
>> I don't know if there's any corner cases that want testing as well.

BQL adjusts the number of packets that can be queued based on their size, so you 
can have far more 64 byte packets queued than you can have 1500 byte packets.

do a ping flood of your network with different packet sizes and look at the 
queue lengths that are allowed, the queue length should be much higher with 
small packets.

>> BQL can be disabled at runtime for comparison testing:
>> http://lists.openwall.net/netdev/2011/12/01/112
>> 
>> There's a BQL tool to see it working graphically (using readouts from the 
>> same sysfs directory):
>> https://github.com/ffainelli/bqlmon
>> 
>> My Kirkwood setup at home is weak, I basically never reach full link speed. 
>> So this might be somewhat academic unless you set the link speed to 100 or 
>> 10 using the ethtool command.  (It seems like a good idea to test those 
>> speeds even if you can do better though).  You probably also want to start 
>> with offloads (tso, gso, gro) disabled using ethtool, because they 
>> aggregate packets.
>> 
>
> a quick test with a 100M setting, connected to gigabit switch, and flent 
> tcp_download, shows ping under load increases to about 8ms. Conclusion: the 
> Debian kirkwood kernel probably isn't doing BQL for me :).

8ms of latency under load is doing very well. what are you expecting?

David Lang

>> Flent can do this test and generate pretty graphs, including a time series 
>> (plot type "all_scaled") and frequency distribution for the ping 
>> ("ping_cdf").  Flent is a frontend to the netperf network performance 
>> tester.  You could use a directly connected laptop and run your own netperf 
>> server (netserver command).  You'll need to set up static IPs on both ends 
>> for the duration... if headless then make sure you have an alternative 
>> console access :).
>> 
>> The normal Flent test is RRUL, which is two-way.  tcp_2up would be better, 
>> to avoid testing both end's BQL at the same time.  If you want to run 
>> tcp_2up the other way round, so you only need netserver on the ARM, try 
>> using '--swap-up-down'.
>> 
>> Alan
>
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