[Cake] [Battlemesh] Wifi Memory limits in small platforms

[Sebastian Moeller]

> On Aug 22, 2019, at 21:37, Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 11:23 AM Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke at redhat.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Sebastian Gottschall <s.gottschall at newmedia-net.de> writes:
>>> 
>>>> Am 22.08.2019 um 19:03 schrieb Dave Taht:
>>>>> Sebastian Gottschall <s.gottschall at newmedia-net.de> writes:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> 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.
>>>>> I did kind of conflate "qos + fq_codel" vs wifi in this message. It
>>>>> looks like yer staying with me.
>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 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.
>>>>> Well, it would be my hope that turning it off would A) not help that
>>>>> much on memory or cpu and B) show such a dramatic reduction in
>>>>> multi-station performance that you'd immediately turn it on again.
>>>> isnt it better to have a working platform with less performance than a
>>>> crashing platform with no performance?
>>>> i mean i can user older mac80211 versions without that issue on a
>>>> typical nanostation 2/5 which is often used just as CPE device
>>> 
>>> So before the queueing patches to mac80211, the maximum packet queue
>>> size for ath9k was 3MB in total, or 2.2MB if only a single AC was used
>>> on the WiFi link (that's 128 packets in the driver + 1000 in the
>>> pfifo_fast qdisc * 2074 bytes for the truesize of a full-size packet).
>>> Whereas now the default is 4MB for a non-vht device. So it's not
>>> actually that big of a difference, and as you've already discovered the
>>> defaults can be changed.
>>> 
>>> Would it be helpful to add support for setting the memory limit in
>>> hostapd (to avoid having to patch the kernel default)?
>> 
>> hmm. I guess exposing that via netlink, etc is a good idea. Me I just
>> write the sys/kernel/debug/*/*/aqm files.
> 
> It already is, and you can set it through iw (as I pointed out
> up-thread):
> 
> iw phy phy0 set txq memory_limit 2097152
> 
> But it's not supported in hostapd, so you have to do that manually as it
> is now.
> 
>> btw:
>> 
>> qos_map in my mind, for APs at this point, should default to the best
>> effort queue only. Not sure how to set that in openwrt (I just patched
>> it out of the kernel).
> 
> Think it's possible to set this in hostapd config; haven't tried it...

	I believe that OpenWrt's hostapd does not support that feature, at least it did not last year when I looked...

Best Regards
	Sebastian

> 
> -Toke
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