[Cerowrt-devel] CeroWrt bits not in OpenWrt (renamed thread)

[Dave Taht]

You all are right, there are several distinct classes of
cerowrt-specific mods. I certainly would like to leverage their
enormous build system (popping out two builds on all arches every
day), and not have to do regular builds and testing again myself, ever
again (for as long as I live!). Ideally I would just hand off our
latest (dumb or smart) bit of code, developed on an x86 and magically
have someone hand me a huge set of test results on platform of choice,
a day later.

It is really amazing the architecture coverage they have:

http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/

A) The most troublesome problem is kernel hacks.

A thought would be to ask the openwrt devs to have a cerowrt repo (or,
more likely, a make-wifi-fast repo at this point),
but still several of these patches and future work planned are going
to be pretty invasive (hitting the mac80211 layer hard as well as
ath9k). Hopefully felix and co are going to handle much of that, and
our role here will be more of testing it...

Several other patches are not as invasive - all the different qdiscs
under test, for example, could easily go into their own
package. The problem I have here is I am resistant to putting buggy
code into public repos. For example, the "pfq_codel" version
does not work worth a damn, and I keep it around because one day it
might provide insight into why packet fairness doesn't
work well (or the code may merely be buggy). Similarly, "cake2" is not
fully baked yet. My own preference for new development
is to have a small, intelligent, educated number of testers before
stuff goes upstream.

I am fully aware that it took too long to get the good stuff done here
pushed upstream on a regular basis, so certainly working more upstream
than we did would be good.

B) Then there is stuff that is largely configuration, and I can see
that being a meta package that you
would have to install manually after flashing, with specialized other
packages (like an iproute2-cerowrt) with the needed
other patches - but that is likely to break on many an architecture in
terms of correctly modifying the network, wireless,
firewall and dhcp configurations

... and it presently is invasive in the boot process itself, renaming
the core network interfaces there.

as an example, the wndr4300 uses vlans by default. The archer has 3
radios. Everything is just mildly, maddeningly,
different.

The core thing is that in order to sanely test wifi, the darn
interfaces need to be unbridged, and nearly everything else we had to
do
to do that, fell out of that. And as it turned out, we never really
got around to tackling wifi in the last release, going all ga-ga over
fixing the ISP link. (which of course, I am very happy about. :))

C) I would certainly like, in particular, for someone to improve
openwrt's firewalling system in general, there is a need for a
"fw4" which would generate nf_tables rules rather than iptables.


On Sat, Feb 28, 2015 at 7:25 AM, Rich Brown <richb.hanover at gmail.com> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> Two thoughts:
>
> 1) I'm renaming this thread so that it is easily found in the archives (it was "Just FYI: WNDR3700 (v2???) refurbs available on Amazon for USD49.99")
>
> 2) I've been maintaining the CeroWrtScripts (https://github.com/richb-hanover/CeroWrtScripts) that has a shell script to set lots of the parameters of CeroWrt into a consistent state. To the extent that the capabilities below are simple config changes, we can use this script as a base for converting "Stock OpenWrt" into something more CeroWrt-like.
>
> Best,
>
> Rich
>
> On Feb 27, 2015, at 11:44 PM, David Lang <david at lang.hm> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 27 Feb 2015, Dave Taht wrote:
>>
>>>> you may have posted this and I'm just not remembering, but do you have a
>>>> list of what's in CeroWRT that OpenWRT won't take upstream (and any info on
>>>> why they won't take the items)?
>>>>
>>>> Daivd Lang
>>
>> trying to break this down by what's a config policy vs what's code (or significant config logic)
>>
>>> * Unbridged interfaces - routing only
>>
>> simple config
>>
>>> * Device Naming by function rather than type
>>
>> is this code or just a set of config settings?
>>
>>> * More open to ipv6 firewall
>>
>> is this just default settings?
>>
>>> * Firewall using device pattern matching to avoid O(n) complexities in
>>> firewall rules
>>
>> This sounds like default settings.
>>
>>> * Babels on and preconfigured by default
>>
>> any code here? or is just that it's there by default?
>>
>>> * Oddball IP address range and /27 subnets
>>
>> simple config
>>
>>> * Polipo Web proxy
>>
>> is this just a different default than upstream?
>>
>>> * Samba by default
>>
>> simple config
>>
>>> * Faster web server
>>
>> just a different default?
>>
>>> * Weird port for the configuration web server
>>
>> simple default
>>
>>> * Pre-enabled wifi and wifi mesh interfaces
>>
>> different defaults
>>
>>> * Huge amount of alternate qdiscs (like pie, ns2_codel, cake, cake2, etc)
>>
>> any custom code here or is this just different kernel config options being turned on?
>>
>>> And:
>>>
>>> A build that includes all these things by default.
>>
>> The vast majority of these seem to be config selections rather then code. Which shows a huge amount of progress from the early days.
>>
>> There seem to be a couple policy points that are worth trying to fight to get upstream
>>
>> 1. Device Naming by function
>>
>> 2. Firewall rules by device pattern matching.
>>
>> 3. pre-enabled wifi and mesh interfaces
>>
>> 4. Samba default (see the recent discussion of common authentication)
>>
>> 5. possibly the web proxy
>>
>> Things that are probably not worth fighting for
>>
>> 1. a build that includes all of this by default
>>
>> 2. all the alternate qdiscs enabled by default
>>
>> 3. weird port for the config web server
>>
>> 4. oddball IP ranges, /27 subnets, bables, and routing between interfaces by default. (This is an approach that is perfect for the "super-duper" builders, although this may just end up being a different default config)
>>
>> any major disagreements or things I missed?
>>
>>
>> It hit me as I was finishing this that a couple things may combine here.
>>
>> By doing device naming by function, firewall rules by device (which ends up being by function), it may make it far easier to have alternate configs, one for bridging, one for routing, and to have options to pre-enable the wifi and mesh interfaces.
>>
>> Thoughts from those who have been more involved with pushing things upstream?
>>
>> David Lang
>> _______________________________________________
>> Cerowrt-devel mailing list
>> Cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
>



-- 
Dave Täht
Let's make wifi fast, less jittery and reliable again!

https://plus.google.com/u/0/107942175615993706558/posts/TVX3o84jjmb