a nuking the mac80211 changing codel parameters patch

[Dave Taht]

I cannot help but wonder what the results have been on people applying
this patch over the past 6 months?

On Tue, Dec 20, 2022 at 12:24 PM Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> This is the single, most buggy, piece of code in "my" portion of wifi
> today. It is so wrong, yet thus far I cannot get it out of linux or
> find an acceptable substitute. It makes it hard to sleep at night
> knowing this code has been so wrong... and now in millions , maybe
> even 10s of millions, of devices by now.... Since I've been ranting
> about the wrongness of this for years, I keep hoping that we can
> excise it, especially for wifi6 devices and even more especially on
> 6ghz spectrum... but just about everything, somehow, would benefit
> hugely if we could somehow do more of the right thing here.
>
> I'd tried, last time I got this bee in my bonnet, tried to nuke this call here:
>
> https://forum.openwrt.org/t/reducing-multiplexing-latencies-still-further-in-wifi/133605/
>
> As it is, I really encourage folk, especially with mt79 and to some
> extent mt76 ac or ath10k, to try out the attached patch, measure tcp
> rtts, and throughput, etc. A slightly less aggressive patch might suit
> wifi-n....
>
> Maybe there's a reason for keeping this code in linux wifi that I do
> not understand. But here are my pithy comments as to why this part of
> mac80211 is so wrong...
>
>  static void sta_update_codel_params(struct sta_info *sta, u32 thr)
>  {
> -       if (thr && thr < STA_SLOW_THRESHOLD * sta->local->num_sta) {
>
> 1) sta->local->num_sta is the number of associated, rather than
> active, stations. "Active" stations in the last 50ms or so, might have
> been a better thing to use, but as most people have far more than that
> associated, we end up with really lousy codel parameters, all the
> time. Mistake numero uno!
>
> 2) The STA_SLOW_THRESHOLD was completely arbitrary in 2016.
>
> -               sta->cparams.target = MS2TIME(50);
>
> This, by itself, was probably not too bad. 30ms might have been
> better, at the time, when we were battling powersave etc, but 20ms was
> enough,
> really, to cover most scenarios, even where we had low rate 2Ghz
> multicast to cope with. Even then, codel has a hard time finding any
> sane drop
> rate at all, with a target this high.
>
> -               sta->cparams.interval = MS2TIME(300);
>
> But this was horrible, a total mistake, that is leading to codel being
> completely ineffective in almost any scenario on clients or APS.
> 100ms, even 80ms, here, would be vastly better than this insanity. I'm
> seeing 5+seconds of delay accumulated in a bunch of otherwise happily
> fq-ing APs....
>
> 100ms of  observed jitter during a flow is enough. Certainly (in 2016)
> there were interactions with powersave that I did not understand, and
> still don't, but
> if you are transmitting in the first place, powersave shouldn't be a
> problemmmm.....
>
> -               sta->cparams.ecn = false;
>
> At the time we were pretty nervous about ecn, I'm kind of sanguine
> about it now, and reliably indicating ecn seems better than turning it
> off for
> any reason.
>
> -       } else {
> -               sta->cparams.target = MS2TIME(20);
> -               sta->cparams.interval = MS2TIME(100);
> -               sta->cparams.ecn = true;
> -       }
>
> And if we aint gonna fiddle with these, we don't need these either.
>
> In production, on p2p wireless, I've had 8ms and 80ms for target and
> interval for years now, and it works great. It is obviously too low,
> for those that
> prize bandwidth over latency (I personally would prefer TXOPs shrink
> intelligently as well as bandwidth, as you add stations, some of which
> happens naturally by fq-codels scheduling mechanisms, others don't, I
> even run with 2ms txops by default on everything myself)
>
> +       return;
>
> Ideally we could kill this entire call off entirely.
>
>  }
>
> A pre-thx for anyone actually trying the attached patch and reporting
> back on any results.
>
> https://forum.openwrt.org/t/reducing-multiplexing-latencies-still-further-in-wifi/133605/
>
>
> --
> This song goes out to all the folk that thought Stadia would work:
> https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dtaht_the-mushroom-song-activity-6981366665607352320-FXtz
> Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC



-- 
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Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos