[Bloat] Sidebar to "How about a topical LWN article on demonstrating the real-world goodness of CAKE?"

[David Collier-Brown]

On 2020-08-09 5:35 p.m., Jonathan Morton wrote:

> Most CPE devices these days rely on hardware accelerated packet forwarding to achieve their published specs.  That's all about taking packets in one side and pushing them out the other as quickly as possible, with only minimal support from the CPU (likely, new connections get a NAT/firewall lookup, that's all).  It has the advantages of speed and power efficiency, but unfortunately it is also incompatible with our debloating efforts.  So debloated CPE will tend to run hotter and with lower peak throughput, which may be noticeable to cable and fibre users; VDSL (FTTC) users might have service of 80Mbps or less where this effect is less likely to matter.
I have an interest in the next step up from mass-market routers, and 
this description made my ears prick up.

At work we have a decent network, carefully designed about 15 years ago 
to get work from Akamai, distribute it over mostly-in-the-same-DC 
service providers, then return it to the end-user customer. The IT folks 
don't know how it works, but are confident that it does (;-))

The nets we use for WFH are a little newer, but we had no idea if we 
were going to be able to work from home or hold conference calls with 
400-odd people. So we had to send everyone home on a Monday to try the 
experiment. Fortunately it worked.

That makes me curious about the customer-premises equipment we and 
others have, and to what degree it can be de-bloated. I know the 
datacenter vendors were being resistant when the problem was first 
solved, but I've not heard anything positive to date.  Cisco makes 
vaguely hand-wavey statements about DOCSIS 3.1 and PIE, but doesn't seem 
to answer customer questions,

What do we know about large-home and small-office devices these days?

--dave

-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb at spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain