Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures
Implementing AQM in FreeBSD
* Overview <http://caia.swin.edu.au/freebsd/aqm/index.html>
* Articles, Papers and Presentations
<http://caia.swin.edu.au/freebsd/aqm/papers.html>
* Patches and Tools <http://caia.swin.edu.au/freebsd/aqm/downloads.html>
Overview
Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in better managing
the depth of bottleneck queues in routers, switches and other places
that get congested. Solutions include transport protocol enhancements
at the end-hosts (such as delay-based or hybrid congestion control
schemes) and active queue management (AQM) schemes applied within
bottleneck queues.
The notion of AQM has been around since at least the late 1990s
(e.g. RFC 2309). In recent years the proliferation of oversized
buffers in all sorts of network devices (aka bufferbloat) has
stimulated keen community interest in four new AQM schemes -- CoDel,
FQ-CoDel, PIE and FQ-PIE.
The IETF AQM working group is looking to document these schemes,
and independent implementations are a corner-stone of the IETF's
process for confirming the clarity of publicly available protocol
descriptions. While significant development work on all three schemes
has occured in the Linux kernel, there is very little in FreeBSD.
Project Goals
This project began in late 2015, and aims to design and implement
functionally-correct versions of CoDel, FQ-CoDel, PIE and FQ_PIE
in FreeBSD (with code BSD-licensed as much as practical). We have
chosen to do this as extensions to FreeBSD's ipfw/dummynet firewall
and traffic shaper. Implementation of these AQM schemes in FreeBSD
will:
* Demonstrate whether the publicly available documentation is
sufficient to enable independent, functionally equivalent implementations
* Provide a broader suite of AQM options for sections the networking
community that rely on FreeBSD platforms
Program Members:
* Rasool Al Saadi (developer)
* Grenville Armitage (project lead)
Acknowledgements:
This project has been made possible in part by a gift from the
Comcast Innovation Fund.
Submitted by: Rasool Al-Saadi <ralsaadi@swin.edu.au>
X-No objection: core
MFC after: 2 weeks
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D6388
for an uninitialized variable.
unused parameters and variables are annotated with
(void)foo; /* UNUSED */
instead of __unused, because this code needs to build
also on linux and windows.
dscp as a search key in table lookups;
+ (re)implement a sysctl variable to control the expire frequency of
pipes and queues when they become empty;
+ add 'queue number' as optional part of the flow_id. This can be
enabled with the command
queue X config mask queue ...
and makes it possible to support priority-based schedulers, where
packets should be grouped according to the priority and not some
fields in the 5-tuple.
This is implemented as follows:
- redefine a field in the ipfw_flow_id (in sys/netinet/ip_fw.h) but
without changing the size or shape of the structure, so there are
no ABI changes. On passing, also document how other fields are
used, and remove some useless assignments in ip_fw2.c
- implement small changes in the userland code to set/read the field;
- revise the functions in ip_dummynet.c to manipulate masks so they
also handle the additional field;
There are no ABI changes in this commit.
and tested over the past two months in the ipfw3-head branch. This
also happens to be the same code available in the Linux and Windows
ports of ipfw and dummynet.
The major enhancement is a completely restructured version of
dummynet, with support for different packet scheduling algorithms
(loadable at runtime), faster queue/pipe lookup, and a much cleaner
internal architecture and kernel/userland ABI which simplifies
future extensions.
In addition to the existing schedulers (FIFO and WF2Q+), we include
a Deficit Round Robin (DRR or RR for brevity) scheduler, and a new,
very fast version of WF2Q+ called QFQ.
Some test code is also present (in sys/netinet/ipfw/test) that
lets you build and test schedulers in userland.
Also, we have added a compatibility layer that understands requests
from the RELENG_7 and RELENG_8 versions of the /sbin/ipfw binaries,
and replies correctly (at least, it does its best; sometimes you
just cannot tell who sent the request and how to answer).
The compatibility layer should make it possible to MFC this code in a
relatively short time.
Some minor glitches (e.g. handling of ipfw set enable/disable,
and a workaround for a bug in RELENG_7's /sbin/ipfw) will be
fixed with separate commits.
CREDITS:
This work has been partly supported by the ONELAB2 project, and
mostly developed by Riccardo Panicucci and myself.
The code for the qfq scheduler is mostly from Fabio Checconi,
and Marta Carbone and Francesco Magno have helped with testing,
debugging and some bug fixes.
"profile" files (bandwidth is mandatory when using a
profile, so it makes sense to have everything in one place).
Update the manpage accordingly.
Submitted by: Marta Carbone
types of MAC overheads such as preambles, link level retransmissions
and more.
Note- this commit changes the userland/kernel ABI for pipes
(but not for ordinary firewall rules) so you need to rebuild
kernel and /sbin/ipfw to use dummynet features.
Please check the manpage for details on the new feature.
The MFC would be trivial but it breaks the ABI, so it will
be postponed until after 7.2 is released.
Interested users are welcome to apply the patch manually
to their RELENG_7 tree.
Work supported by the European Commission, Projects Onelab and
Onelab2 (contract 224263).
