[Cake] Wifi Memory limits in small platforms

[Sebastian Gottschall]

Am 22.08.2019 um 15:15 schrieb Dave Taht:
> It's very good to know how much folk have been struggling to keep
> things from OOMing on 32MB platforms. I'd like to hope that the
> unified memory management in cake (vs a collection of QoS qdiscs) and
> the new fq_codel for wifi stuff (cutting it down to 1 alloc from four)
> help, massively on this issue, but until today I was unaware of how
> much the field may have been patching things out.
>
> The default 32MB memory limits in fq_codel comes from the stressing
> about 10GigE networking from google. 4MB is limit in openwrt,
> which is suitable for ~1Gbit, and is sort of there  due to 802.11ac's
> maximum (impossible to hit) of a txop that large.
>
> Something as small as 256K is essentially about 128 full size packets
> (and often, acks from an ethernet device's rx ring eat 2k).

what i miss in mac80211 is the following option "fq_codel = off"
its essential and i will definitly work on a patch to deal with this way 
for low memory 802.11n platforms.

>
> The structure of the new fq_codel for wifi subsystem is "one in the
> hardware, one ready to go, and the rest accumulating". I
> typically see about 13-20 packets in an aggregate. 256k strikes me as
> a bit small.
from the rules its that 256 is used for ht only and if vht is involved 
the limit of 4mb is used.
but now comes the point. all 802.11ac platforms having 64mb ram or more. 
but ath10k chipsets are using
about 40 mb of shared memory. so mmh we are hitting the wall again. most 
routers have 128 mb with 802.11ac, but some (noticable dlink) have just 64mb
>
> I haven't checked, but does this patch still exist in openwrt/dd-wrt?
> It had helped a lot when under memory pressure from
> a lot of small packets.
>
> https://github.com/dtaht/cerowrt-3.10/blob/master/target/linux/generic/patches-3.10/657-qdisc_reduce_truesize.patch
>
> Arguably this could be made more aggressive, but it massively reduced
> memory burdens at the time I did it when
> flooding the device, or having lots of acks, and while it cost cpu it
> saved on ooming.
mmh let me check -> nope its at least not in my tree. but will be soon :-)
>
> There's two other dubious things in the fq_codel for wifi stack
> presently. Right now the codel target is set too high for p2p use
> (20ms, where 6ms seems more right), and it also flips up to a really
> high target and interval AND turns off ecn when there's more than a
> few stations available (rather than "active") - it's an overly
> conservative figure we used back when we had major issues with
> powersave
> and multicast that I'd hoped we could cut back to normal after we got
> another round of research funding and feedback from the field (which
> didn't happen, and we never got around to making it configurable, and
> being 25x better than it was before seemed "enough")
>
> I was puzzled at battlemesh as to why I had dropping at about 50ms
> delay rather than ecn, and thought it was something
> else, and this morning I'm thinking that folk have been reducing the
> memlimit to 256k rather....
>