[Cerowrt-devel] [Bloat] beating the drum for BQL

[Pete Heist]

> On Aug 23, 2018, at 12:51 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike at swm.pp.se> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 23 Aug 2018, Pete Heist wrote:
> 
>> Thanks for sharing, this is really useful, raising awareness where it matters. Quite a bit of content... :)
>> 
>> Ubiquiti needs some work getting this into more of their products (EdgeMAX in particular). A good time to lobby for this might be, well a couple months ago, as they’re producing alpha builds for their upcoming 2.0 release with kernel 4.9 and new Cavium/Mediatek/Octeon SDKs. I just asked about the status in the EdgeRouter Beta forum, in case it finds the right eyes before the release:
>> 
>> https://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeRouter-Beta/BQL-support/m-p/2466657 <https://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeRouter-Beta/BQL-support/m-p/2466657>
>> 
>> https://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeMAX-Beta-Blog/New-EdgeRouter-firmware-2-0-0-alpha-2-has-been-released/ba-p/2414938 <https://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeMAX-Beta-Blog/New-EdgeRouter-firmware-2-0-0-alpha-2-has-been-released/ba-p/2414938>
> 
> My only experience with these devices is the Edgerouter 3/5/X, and they have very low performance if you disable offloads (which you need to do to enable AQM) and run everything in CPU, around 100 megabit/s of uni-directional traffic.

I have a similar experience with my ER-X- with soft rate limiting (the only thing allowed in the UI), 120-140Mbit is the upper limit.

> Do they have other platforms where this would actually matter?

One can add fq_codel or Cake from the command line (many are doing so), and some may be using 100Mbit Ethernet. In that case, BQL could be useful even on these devices when run at line rate, without soft rate limiting.

I’m also assuming that their higher-end products are capable of fq_codel at 1 Gbit, and that some may use those devices at line rate. Any time this is the case, even if only during bursts, BQL would be useful, I suppose...