[Codel] [Make-wifi-fast] [RFCv2 1/3] mac80211: implement fq_codel for software queuing

[Michal Kazior]

On 22 March 2016 at 02:35, David Lang <david at lang.hm> wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Mar 2016, Michal Kazior wrote:
>
>> Since 11n aggregation become important to get the
>> best out of txops. However aggregation inherently
>> requires buffering and queuing. Once variable
>> medium conditions to different associated stations
>> is considered it became apparent that bufferbloat
>> can't be simply fought with qdiscs for wireless
>> drivers.
>
> If the network is quiet enough, don't do any buffering, but in almost all
> situations you are going to need to buffer starting no later than the second
> packet you try to send.
>
> Don't try to make queueing occur, just deal with the queues that form
> naturally because you can't transmit data any faster (and work to keep them
> under some semblence of control)
[...]

This is what already happens. Queues typically start to build up when
hardware tx fifos/queues become busy so by the time they become
available you might have a bunch of frames you can aggregate.

The patch is more about getting rid of qdiscs because it's inherently
hard to teach them how 802.11 aggregation works (per-station per-tid)
and the ever-changing nature of per-station tx conditions.

I'll update the commit log to better reflect what is being done.


Michał