[Bloat] [Cake] flent testers wanted prior to next release

[Stephen Hemminger]

On Tue, 20 Dec 2016 11:02:44 -0800
Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:

> Toke has been busy adding new features to the flent network test tool.
> I consider it *almost* stable enough for a new release. Some of the
> development has been focused on making the flent-gui much faster and
> more responsive (as our data sets have got larger), others on
> providing better default command line output, and there's other fixes
> across the board, including QT5 support.
> 
> In particular, I fear we've broken windows users of flent. I would
> dearly like it if some more folk out there using flent could pull the
> latest git version and see if there are any new bugs or regressions in
> it, any of the the 87 tests, and the plotters, before freezing the
> code for a new year's release.
> 
> github: https://github.com/tohojo/flent
> main site: https://flent.org/
> 
> While you are at it, please feel free to stress out any of the flent
> servers as a target, give the new cake a shot and compare it against
> htb+fq_codel or your aqm of choice, or fiddle with the new wifi code,
> and share your data. tcp_nup, tcp_ndown, rrul, rrul_be remain the main
> tests, but the square wave one is turning out interesting.... :)
> 
> And if you have any feature requests or bugs to file, please get them
> in soon to the github!
> 
> We could also use better documentation and tutorials for use... some
> more example scripts leveraging things like the cpu_stats and
> qdisc_stats tools, and so on,
> 
> Active public servers include:
> 
> flent-freemont.bufferbloat.net
> ( this is colocated with flent-bbr-west which has bbr on by default - an
> interesting test might be testing both these servers at the same time
> via the rtt_fair* tests from your location)
> 
> flent-dallas.bufferbloat.net
> flent-london.bufferbloat.net
> flent-tokyo.bufferbloat.net
> flent-newark.bufferbloat.net
> 
> There are also netperf-west and netperf-east and netperf-eu and no
> doubt a few others.
> 
> We plan to add a few BBR enabled servers over the holidays.
> 
> The changelog so far:
> 
> 
> - Support PyQt5 in the GUI (and prefer it over PyQt4). If PyQt5 is not
> found, fall back to PyQt4.
> 
> 
> - Add new SummaryFormatter that outputs mean and median values for
> each data series. This is the new default formatter, meaning that its
> output will be shown after a test run if no other formatter (or plot)
> is specified.
> 
> - Support multiprocessing in the GUI. When loading several plots at
> once, plotting will now be passed off to separate worker processes.
> 
>   This allows plotting to use all the available processors on the
> machine, and speeds up loading of many plots tremendously (initial
> load is sped up by an order of magnitude). This change also means that
> re-plotting on config changes will be done dynamically in the
> background, which makes the GUI more responsive.
> 
> - Make text completely black in the default colour scheme. This
> increases contrast, and helps legibility, especially on printed
> figures.
> 
> 
> - Some internal code changes: Port command line parser from the old
> optparse class to the newer argparse, and fix a bunch of linter
> 
> 

Has anyone automated or orchestrated flent? I would love to get several
projects doing daily build flent runs. Both upstream kernel, net-next,
and Intel Clear Linux has nightly build and test.

Also Microsoft's internal Linux testing of kernel devices, maybe
even the Azure development cycle. Though I doubt those results could
be shared.