[Cerowrt-devel] Google working on experimental 3.8 Linux kernel for Android

Fri Mar 1 11:27:08 EST 2013

I don't doubt that they test.  My point was different - there are too many knobs and too big a parameter space to test efectively.  And that's the point.

I realize that it's extremely fun to invent parameters in "standards organizations" like 3GPP.  Everybody has their own favorite knob, and a great rationale for some unusual, but critically "important" customer requirement that might come up some day.  Hell, Linux has a gazillion (yes, that's a technical term in mathematics!) parameters, almost none of which are touched.  This reflects the fact that nothing ever gets removed once added.  LTE is now going into release 12, and it's completely ramified into "solutions" to problems that will never be fixed in the field with those solutions.  It's great for European Publically Funded Academic-Industry research - lots for those "Professors" to claim they invented.

I've worked with telco contractors in the field.   They don't read manuals, and they don't read specs.  They have a job to do, and so much money to spend, and time's a wasting.  They don't even work for Verizon or ATT.  They follow "specs" handed down, and charge more if you tell them that the specs have changed.

This is not how brand-new systems get tuned.

It's a Clown Circus out there, and more parameters don't help.

This is why "more buffering is better" continues to be the law of the land - the spec is defined to be "no lost packets under load".   I'm sure that the primary measure under load for RRUL will be "no lost packets" by the time it gets to field engineers in the form of "specs" - because that's what they've *always* been told, and they will disregard any changes as "typos".

A system with more than two control parameters that interact in complex ways is ungovernable - and no control parameters in LTE are "orthogonal", much less "linear" in their interaction.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Jim Gettys" <jg at freedesktop.org>
Sent: Friday, March 1, 2013 11:09am
To: "David P Reed" <dpreed at reed.com>
Cc: "Ketan Kulkarni" <ketkulka at gmail.com>, "cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net" <cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net>
Subject: Re: [Cerowrt-devel] Google working on experimental 3.8 Linux kernel for Android

On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 10:40 AM,  <[mailto:dpreed at reed.com] dpreed at reed.com> wrote:

One wonders why all this complexity is necessary, and how likely it is to be "well tuned" by operators and their contract installers.

I'm willing to bet $1000 that all the testing that is done is "Can you hear me now" and a "speed test".  Not even something as simple and effective as RRUL.
Actually, at least some the the carriers do much more extensive testing; but not with the test tools we would like to see used (yet).
An example is AT&T, where in research, KK Ramakrishnan has a van with 20 or so laptops so he can go driving around and load up a cell in the middle of the night and get data.   And he's research; the operations guys do lots of testing I gather, but more at the radio level.
Next up, is to educate KK to run RRUL.
And in my own company, I've seen data, but it is too high level: e.g. performance of "web" video: e.g. siverlight, flash, youtube, etc.
A common disease that has complicated all this is the propensity for companies to use Windows XP internally for everything: since window scaling is turned off, you can't saturate a LTE link the way you might like to do with a single TCP connection.
- Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: "Ketan Kulkarni" <[mailto:ketkulka at gmail.com] ketkulka at gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, March 1, 2013 3:00am
To: "Jim Gettys" <[mailto:jg at freedesktop.org] jg at freedesktop.org>
 Cc: "[mailto:cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net] cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net" <[mailto:cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net] cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net>
 Subject: Re: [Cerowrt-devel] Google working on experimental 3.8 Linux kernel for Android

On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 1:33 AM, Jim Gettys <[mailto:jg at freedesktop.org] jg at freedesktop.org> wrote:

I've got a bit more insight into LTE than I did in the past, courtesy of the last couple days.
To begin with, LTE runs with several classes of service (the call them bearers).  Your VOIP traffic goes into one of them.
And I think there is another as well that is for guaranteed bit rate traffic.  One transmit opportunity may have a bunch of chunks of data, and that data may be destined for more than one device (IIRC).  It's substantially different than WiFi.
Just thought to put more light on bearer stuff:

There are two ways bearers are setup: 
1. UE initiated - where User Equipment sets-up the "parameters" for bearer 
 2. Network initiated - where node like PCRF and PGW sets-up the "parameters". 
 Parameters include the Guaranteed bit-rates, maximum bit-rates. Something called QCI is associated with bearers. The QCI parameters are authorized at PCRF (policy control rule function) and there is certain mapping maintained at either PCRF or PGW between QCI values and DSCP and MBRs.
 These parameters enforcing is done at PGW (in such case it is termed as PCEF - policy and rule enforcement function). So PGWs depending on bearers can certainly modify dscp bits. Though these can be modified by other nodes in the network. 

There are two types of bearers: 1. Dedicated bearers - to carry traffic which need "special" treatment 2. Default or general pupose bearers - to carry all general purpose data.
So generally the voip, streaming videos are passed over dedicated bearers and apply (generally) higher GBRs, MBRs and correct dscp markings.
 And other non-latency sensitive traffic generally follows the default bearer.

Theoretical limit on maximum bearers is 11 though practically most of the deployments use upto 3 bearers max.

Note that these parameters may very well very based on the subscriber profiles. Premium/Corporate subscribers can well have more GBRs and MBRs.
 ISPs are generally very much sensitive to the correct markings at gateways for obvious reasons.

But most of what we think of as Internet stuff (web surfing, dns, etc) all gets dumped into a single best effort ("BE"), class.
The BE class is definitely badly bloated; I can't say how much because I don't really know yet; the test my colleague ran wasn't run long enough to be confident it filled the buffers).  But I will say worse than most cable modems I've seen.  I expect this will be true to different degrees on different hardware.  The other traffic classes haven't been tested yet for bufferbloat, though I suspect they will have it too.  I was told that those classes have much shorter queues, and when the grow, they dump the whole queues (because delivering late real time traffic is useless).  But trust *and* verify....  Verification hasn't been done for anything but BE traffic, and that hasn't been quantified.
But each device gets a "fair" shot at bandwidth in the cell (or sector of a cell; they run 3 radios in each cell), where fair is basically time based; if you are at the edge of a cell, you'll get a lot less bandwidth than someone near a tower; and this fairness is guaranteed by a scheduler than runs in the base station (called a b-nodeb, IIIRC).  So the base station guarantees some sort of "fairness" between devices (a place where Linux's wifi stack today fails utterly, since there is a single queue per device, rather than one per station).
Whether there are bloat problems at the link level in LTE due to error correction I don't know yet; but it wouldn't surprise me; I know there was in 3g.  The people I talked to this morning aren't familiar with the HARQ layer in the system.
The base stations are complicated beasts; they have both a linux system in them as well as a real time operating system based device inside  We don't know where the bottle neck(s) are yet.  I spent lunch upping their paranoia and getting them through some conceptual hurdles (e.g. multiple bottlenecks that may move, and the like).  They will try to get me some of the data so I can help them figure it out.  I don't know if the data flow goes through the linux system in the bnodeb or not, for example.
Most carriers are now trying to ensure that their backhauls from the base station are never congested, though that is another known source of problems.  And then there is the lack of AQM at peering point routers....  You'd think they might run WRED there, but many/most do not.
- Jim

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 2:08 PM, Dave Taht <[mailto:dave.taht at gmail.com] dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 1:57 PM,  <[mailto:dpreed at reed.com] dpreed at reed.com> wrote:

Doesn't fq_codel need an estimate of link capacity?
No, it just measures delay. Since so far as I know the outgoing portion of LTE is not soft-rate limited, but sensitive to the actual available link bandwidth, fq_codel should work pretty good (if the underlying interfaces weren't horribly overbuffired) in that direction.
I'm looking forward to some measurements of actual buffering at the device driver/device levels.
I don't know how inbound to the handset is managed via LTE.
Still quite a few assumptions left to smash in the above.
...
in the home router case....
...
When there are artificial rate limits in play (in, for example, a cable modem/CMTS, hooked up via gigE yet rate limiting to 24up/4mbit down), then a rate limiter (tbf,htb,hfsc) needs to be applied locally to move that rate limiter/queue management into the local device, se we can manage it better.
I'd like to be rid of the need to use htb and come up with a rate limiter that could be adjusted dynamically from a daemon in userspace, probing for short all bandwidth fluctuations while monitoring the load. It needent send that much data very often, to come up with a stable result....
You've described one soft-rate sensing scheme (piggybacking on TCP), and I've thought up a few others, that could feed back from a daemon some samples into a a soft(er) rate limiter that would keep control of the queues in the home router. I am thinking it's going to take way too long to fix the CPE and far easier to fix the home router via this method, and certainly it's too painful and inaccurate to merely measure the bandwidth once, then set a hard rate, when
So far as I know the gargoyle project was experimenting with this approach.
A problem is in places that connect more than one device to the cable modem... then you end up with those needing to communicate their perception of the actual bandwidth beyond the link.

Where will it get that from the 4G or 3G uplink?

-----Original Message-----
From: "Maciej Soltysiak" <[mailto:maciej at soltysiak.com] maciej at soltysiak.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2013 1:03pm
 To: [mailto:cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net] cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
Subject: [Cerowrt-devel] Google working on experimental 3.8 Linux kernel for Android

Hiya,
Looks like Google's experimenting with 3.8 for Android: [https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/common/+/experimental/android-3.8] https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/common/+/experimental/android-3.8
Sounds great if this means they will utilize fq_codel, TFO, BQL, etc.
Anyway my nexus 7 says it has 3.1.10 and this 3.8 will probably go to Android 5.0 so I hope Nexus 7 will get it too some day or at least 3.3+
Phoronix coverage: [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxMzc] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxMzc
Their 3.8 changelog: [https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/common/+log/experimental/android-3.8] https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/common/+log/experimental/android-3.8
Regards,
Maciej_______________________________________________
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-- 
Dave Täht

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