[Cake] second system syndrome

Sun Dec 6 13:21:12 EST 2015

Comments:

My feeling is that we've been here (or close to here) before, and every
time there has been a 'just one more thing/feature' Columbo moment which
puts it all on hold again.  The last time was 'dual flow isolation'. 
Without wishing to stir too much that pot again I do think the 'dual
flow isolation', if I understand the intention correctly*, is a feature
that 'consumers' would find desirable.

I'm wondering what the hold up is and whether I can help.   I personally
pledge £200 to the cake project.  I know it's not much in terms of
hours/rate etc but please take it as a sign of how much I personally
want cake to move forward and realise my own limitations in doing so.

One feature/benefit that hasn't been measured yet is 'simplicity'.  cake
offers a good shaper, fair qeueing, dscp washing, overhead/framing
calculation/compensation all in one pretty damn easy to configure package. 

*trying to ensure fairness between hosts, not just between queues.  I
think the main aim/thought is having a 'bittorrent' host isolated and
low priority from everything else.

On 06/12/15 14:53, Dave Taht wrote:
> I find myself torn by 3 things.
>
> 1) The number of huge wins in fixing wifi far outweigh what we have
> thus far achieved, or not achieved, in cake.
>
> 2) Science - Cake is like wet paint! There knobs to fiddle, endless
> tests to run, new ideas to try... measurements to take! papers to
> write!
>
> 3) Engineering - I just want it to be *done*. It's been too long. It
> was demonstrably faster than htb + fq_codel on weak hardware last
> june, and handled GRO peeling, which were the two biggest "bugs" in
> sqm I viewed we had.
>
> In wearing these 3 hats, I would
>
> 3A) like to drop cake, personally, from something I needed to care about.
> 3B) But, can't, because the profusion of features need to be fully evaluated.
> In this test series: http://snapon.cs.kau.se/~d/bcake_tests/ neither
> cake or bcake were "better" than the existing codel in any measurable
> way, and in most cases, worse. bcake did mildly better at a short
> (10ms) RTT... which was interesting.
>
> If you want to take apart this batch with "flent", looking for
> enlightenment, also, please go ahead.
>
> Were I to short circuit the science here, I'd rip out the sqrt cache
> and fold back in mainline codel into cake. This would also have the
> added benefit of also moving us back to 32bitland for various values
> (tho "now" becomes a bit trickier) and hopefully improving cpu
> efficiency a bit further (but this has to get done carefully unless
> your head is good at 32 bit overflow math)
>
> Next up, a series testing the fq portions...
>
> If someone (else) would like to fork cake again and do the two things
> above, I'd appreciate it.
>
> 3C) Most of the new statistics are pretty useless IMHO. Interesting,
> but in the end I mostly care about drops and marks only.
>
> 3D) Don't have a use for the rate estimator either, and so far the
> dual queue idea has not materialized. I understand how it might be
> done now - using the 8 way set associative thing per DEST hash, but I
> don't really see the benefit of that vs just using a DEST hash in the
> first place.
>
> 3E) Want cake to run as fast as possible on cheap hardware and be a
> demonstrable win over htb + fq_codel - and upstream it and be done
> with it.
>
> 3F) At the moment I'm favoring peeling at the current quantum rather
> than anything more elaborate.
>
> 3G) really want the thing to work correctly down to 64k and up to at
> least a gbit.
> which needs testing... but probably after we pick a codel....
>
> 2A) As a science vehicle, there are many other things we could be
> trying in cake, and I happen to like the idea of the (currently sort)
> cache in for example, trying a faster curve at startup - or, as in the
> ns2 code - a harder curve at say count + 128 or even earlier, as the
> speed up in drops gets pretty tiny even at count + 16. (see attached)
>
> (it doesn't make much sense to calculate the sqrt at run time - you
> can just calculate the constants elsewhere and plug them in, btw.
> attached is a teeny proggie that does that an also explores a harder
> initial curve (you'd jump count up to where it matched the curve when
> you reverted to the invsqrt calculation) - and no, I haven't tried
> plugging this in either... DANGER! Wet Paint!
>
> I also like keeping all the core values 64 bits, from a science perspective.
>
> There are also things like reducing the number of flows, and
> exercising the 8 way associative cache more - to say 256, 128, or even
> 32? Or relative to the bandwidth... or target setting...
>
> and I do keep wishing we could at the very least resolve the target >
> mtu issue. std codel turns off with a single mtu outstanding. That
> arguably should have been all that was needed...
>
> and then there's ecn...
>
> 1A) Boy do we have major problems with wifi, and major gains to be had
> 1B) All the new platforms have bugs eveyerhwer, including in the
> ethernet drivers
>
> 0)
>
> So I guess it does come down to - what are the "musts" for cake before
> it goes upstream? How much more work is required, by everybody, on
> every topic, til that happens? Can we just fork off what is known to
> work reasonably well, and let the rest evolve separately in a cake2?
> (cleaning up the api in the process?) Is it still "cake" if we do
> that?
>
> Because, damn it, 2016 is going to be the year of WiFi.
>
>
> Dave Täht
> Let's go make home routers and wifi faster! With better software!
> https://www.gofundme.com/savewifi
>
>
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