[Bloat] [Make-wifi-fast] [Cake] flent testers wanted prior to next release

[Toke Høiland-Jørgensen]

Stephen Hemminger <stephen at networkplumber.org> writes:

> 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.

Flent has a built-in batch mode that lets you automate running several
tests in a row including setup/teardown scripts etc... Is that what you
mean?

-Toke