[Starlink] Bufferbloat.net fund drive

[Dave Taht]

Donations to the core bufferbloat effort are at an all time low,
$832.00/month. [1]

I am presently also in the process of finalizing a response to a FCC
NOI for which I will conduct another funding (and signature!) drive
later this week. It is due December 1, and I hope to start circulating
a rough draft nov 27th.

This past year:

Presently bufferbloat.net's fixed expenses run at about $542/month for
Linode hosting of the website and the worldwide fleet of flent test
servers. We have a grant from Equinix for bare metal hardware (but
mostly used that up for libreqos (other uses of bare metal wanted?)).
We had another grant from NLnet covering some but *far* from all of
LibreQos's costs. Thank you to both those orgs for their support this
past year!

... but if anyone (or their organisation) would like to throw in to
keeping the servers alive, and to me for maintaining and moderating
these lists... please click here: https://www.patreon.com/dtaht . I
have to admit being a little overstretched, right now.

For the past year, most (nearly all of mine, anyway) of our efforts
have been focused on making LibreQos the fastest, most stable CAKE
shaping and packet analysis tool anyone has ever seen, making ISPs
capable of deploying better user experiences, overnight.

The LibreQos team shipped v1.4 with massive improvements across the
board last week!

We have not got around to a bigger release announcement yet - there
were some teething pains that might result in a v1.4.1 respin!
LibreQos can push 25Gbits for 10,000 ISP network subscribers across 20
cores of Xeon running 50% idle through 10k instances of the CAKE
qdisc. For an ISP, the CAPEX/subscriber to deploy is a few dozen
pennies, once, the time-to-first-deployment measured in weekends. Tell
your ISPs about it? The core of LibreQos is GPLv2 software, available
from github and leverages C, python and Rust.

A huge thanks to herbert, robert, frank, trendal, dan, lachlan, mark,
naiux and the other 180 people in the matrix chat channel now using it
for all the development and testing and deployment to date.

LibreQoE, LLC (the group of founders behind it, which includes me)
have a plan for a commercial addon for LTS (Long-term statistics) for
this but the core shaping and analysis engine will always remain libre
software. rust/python/C developers, testers, the merely curious
network nerd, the ISP that wants to make serious strides on latency
and make their gamers and voipers and videoconfrencers happier, please
have at it. I will be talking more abut LibreQoS's global analysis of
worldwide packet flow statistics  at the upcoming UnderstandingLatency
conference Dec 11-13.

I was very pleased to see the OpenWrt 23 release happen last month,
chock full of net goodness (my thanks to everyone on that team!) I
hope y'all have been upgrading! If you are in a donating mood, that
org always could use some, too.

In other business...

I really need to sit down and write up all the amazing stuff that
happened this year sometime next month. Please forgive me for if I
missed you below... or step forth and toot your own horn? Drop me an
email privately and tell me what you did so I can include it in the
end of year report?

Especially at this moment: I would like to thank Dave Seddon very much
to getting at the bottom of all the ARM64 issues w/fq_codel and w/cake
we have been seeing all year. It turned out that nearly half the arm64
ethernet drivers he looked at were broken in some way, that there are
some severe memory bandwidth issues that affect even FIFOs on the low
end... and that the pi5 is looking good. There has been some progress
on fixing those arm drivers since.

I would like to thank also Jamal at netdevconf for asking me for talks
in Canada last month. It had a focusing effect, and brought me into
contact with a new generation of developers.

Moving forward into next year, in particular right now, on my mind -
if anyone knows of some org that can help on the next version of cake
as the next openwrt development cycle ramps up (making it multicore
among other things), please let me know off-list.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tTYBPeaRdCO9AGTGQCpoiuLORQzN_bG3TAkEolJPh28/edit#heading=h.vbbnfu73wlpp

Thank you everyone for all your efforts in beating the bloat,
worldwide. Never has so much been accomplished by so many, on so
little, in (admittedly) 14 years of working together, mostly as
volunteers, as we have. I feel like we are finally rounding the corner
on these projects.

Suggestions for other things to focus on next year, welcomed! Happy
thanksgiving... and if you have not seen "Alices Restaurant,
Illustrated", check it out on youtube. It's a gas.

[1] Bufferbloat.net is not a 501c(3), just an outgrowth of
TekLibre.net's other activities.

-- 
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos