The ACK filter is an optional feature of CAKE which is designed to improve
performance on links with very asymmetrical rate limits. On such links
(which are unfortunately quite prevalent, especially for DSL and cable
subscribers), the downstream throughput can be limited by the number of
ACKs capable of being transmitted in the *upstream* direction.
Filtering ACKs can, in general, have adverse effects on TCP performance
because it interferes with ACK clocking (especially in slow start), and it
reduces the flow's resiliency to ACKs being dropped further along the path.
To alleviate these drawbacks, the ACK filter in CAKE tries its best to
always keep enough ACKs queued to ensure forward progress in the TCP flow
being filtered. It does this by only filtering redundant ACKs. In its
default 'conservative' mode, the filter will always keep at least two
redundant ACKs in the queue, while in 'aggressive' mode, it will filter
down to a single ACK.
The ACK filter works by inspecting the per-flow queue on every packet
enqueue. Starting at the head of the queue, the filter looks for another
eligible packet to drop (so the ACK being dropped is always closer to the
head of the queue than the packet being enqueued). An ACK is eligible only
if it ACKs *fewer* bytes than the new packet being enqueued, including any
SACK options. This prevents duplicate ACKs from being filtered, to avoid
interfering with retransmission logic. In addition, we check TCP header
options and only drop those that are known to not interfere with sender
state. In particular, packets with unknown option codes are never dropped.
In aggressive mode, an eligible packet is always dropped, while in
conservative mode, at least two ACKs are kept in the queue. Only pure ACKs
(with no data segments) are considered eligible for dropping, but when an
ACK with data segments is enqueued, this can cause another pure ACK to
become eligible for dropping.
The approach described above ensures that this ACK filter avoids most of
the drawbacks of a naive filtering mechanism that only keeps flow state but
does not inspect the queue. This is the rationale for including the ACK
filter in CAKE itself rather than as separate module (as the TC filter, for
instance).
Our performance evaluation has shown that on a 30/1 Mbps link with a
bidirectional traffic test (RRUL), turning on the ACK filter on the
upstream link improves downstream throughput by ~20% (both modes) and
upstream throughput by ~12% in conservative mode and ~40% in aggressive
mode, at the cost of ~5ms of inter-flow latency due to the increased
congestion.
In *really* pathological cases, the effect can be a lot more; for instance,
the ACK filter increases the achievable downstream throughput on a link
with 100 Kbps in the upstream direction by an order of magnitude (from ~2.5
Mbps to ~25 Mbps).
Finally, even though we consider the ACK filter to be safer than most, we
do not recommend turning it on everywhere: on more symmetrical link
bandwidths the effect is negligible at best.
Cc: Yuchung Cheng <ycheng@google.com>
Cc: Neal Cardwell <ncardwell@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@toke.dk>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
The ingress mode is meant to be enabled when CAKE runs downlink of the
actual bottleneck (such as on an IFB device). The mode changes the shaper
to also account dropped packets to the shaped rate, as these have already
traversed the bottleneck.
Enabling ingress mode will also tune the AQM to always keep at least two
packets queued *for each flow*. This is done by scaling the minimum queue
occupancy level that will disable the AQM by the number of active bulk
flows. The rationale for this is that retransmits are more expensive in
ingress mode, since dropped packets have to traverse the bottleneck again
when they are retransmitted; thus, being more lenient and keeping a minimum
number of packets queued will improve throughput in cases where the number
of active flows are so large that they saturate the bottleneck even at
their minimum window size.
This commit also adds a separate switch to enable ingress mode rate
autoscaling. If enabled, the autoscaling code will observe the actual
traffic rate and adjust the shaper rate to match it. This can help avoid
latency increases in the case where the actual bottleneck rate decreases
below the shaped rate. The scaling filters out spikes by an EWMA filter.
Signed-off-by: Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@toke.dk>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
sch_cake targets the home router use case and is intended to squeeze the
most bandwidth and latency out of even the slowest ISP links and routers,
while presenting an API simple enough that even an ISP can configure it.
Example of use on a cable ISP uplink:
tc qdisc add dev eth0 cake bandwidth 20Mbit nat docsis ack-filter
To shape a cable download link (ifb and tc-mirred setup elided)
tc qdisc add dev ifb0 cake bandwidth 200mbit nat docsis ingress wash
CAKE is filled with:
* A hybrid Codel/Blue AQM algorithm, "Cobalt", tied to an FQ_Codel
derived Flow Queuing system, which autoconfigures based on the bandwidth.
* A novel "triple-isolate" mode (the default) which balances per-host
and per-flow FQ even through NAT.
* An deficit based shaper, that can also be used in an unlimited mode.
* 8 way set associative hashing to reduce flow collisions to a minimum.
* A reasonable interpretation of various diffserv latency/loss tradeoffs.
* Support for zeroing diffserv markings for entering and exiting traffic.
* Support for interacting well with Docsis 3.0 shaper framing.
* Extensive support for DSL framing types.
* Support for ack filtering.
* Extensive statistics for measuring, loss, ecn markings, latency
variation.
A paper describing the design of CAKE is available at
https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.07617, and will be published at the 2018 IEEE
International Symposium on Local and Metropolitan Area Networks (LANMAN).
This patch adds the base shaper and packet scheduler, while subsequent
commits add the optional (configurable) features. The full userspace API
and most data structures are included in this commit, but options not
understood in the base version will be ignored.
Various versions baking have been available as an out of tree build for
kernel versions going back to 3.10, as the embedded router world has been
running a few years behind mainline Linux. A stable version has been
generally available on lede-17.01 and later.
sch_cake replaces a combination of iptables, tc filter, htb and fq_codel
in the sqm-scripts, with sane defaults and vastly simpler configuration.
CAKE's principal author is Jonathan Morton, with contributions from
Kevin Darbyshire-Bryant, Toke Høiland-Jørgensen, Sebastian Moeller,
Ryan Mounce, Tony Ambardar, Dean Scarff, Nils Andreas Svee, Dave Täht,
and Loganaden Velvindron.
Testing from Pete Heist, Georgios Amanakis, and the many other members of
the cake@lists.bufferbloat.net mailing list.
tc -s qdisc show dev eth2
qdisc cake 8017: root refcnt 2 bandwidth 1Gbit diffserv3 triple-isolate split-gso rtt 100.0ms noatm overhead 38 mpu 84
Sent 51504294511 bytes 37724591 pkt (dropped 6, overlimits 64958695 requeues 12)
backlog 0b 0p requeues 12
memory used: 1053008b of 15140Kb
capacity estimate: 970Mbit
min/max network layer size: 28 / 1500
min/max overhead-adjusted size: 84 / 1538
average network hdr offset: 14
Bulk Best Effort Voice
thresh 62500Kbit 1Gbit 250Mbit
target 5.0ms 5.0ms 5.0ms
interval 100.0ms 100.0ms 100.0ms
pk_delay 5us 5us 6us
av_delay 3us 2us 2us
sp_delay 2us 1us 1us
backlog 0b 0b 0b
pkts 3164050 25030267 9530280
bytes 3227519915 35396974782 12879808898
way_inds 0 8 0
way_miss 21 366 25
way_cols 0 0 0
drops 5 0 1
marks 0 0 0
ack_drop 0 0 0
sp_flows 1 3 0
bk_flows 0 1 1
un_flows 0 0 0
max_len 68130 68130 68130
Tested-by: Pete Heist <peteheist@gmail.com>
Tested-by: Georgios Amanakis <gamanakis@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@toke.dk>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Toke Høiland-Jørgensen