After reading several forums with people arguing about what routers should be configured with the "ip pim autorp listener" command, I have decided to write this post explaining things in my own way (of course, with a lot of pictures, as usual).
Latency much more than bandwidth governs actual internet “speed”, as best expressed in written form by Stuart Chesire’s It’s the Latency, Stupid rant and more formally in Latency and the Quest for Interactivity.
Speed != bandwidth despite all of what an ISP’s marketing department will tell you. This misconception is reflected up to and including FCC Commissioner Julius Genachowski, and is common even among technologists who should know better, and believed by the general public. You pick an airplane to fly across the ocean, rather than a ship, even though the capacity of the ship may be far higher.
The Internet could and should degrade gradually in the face of load; but today’s Internet does not degrade gracefully due to bufferbloat. Instead, performance falls off a cliff. We are lemmings on migration.
The Internet is designed to run as fast as it can, and so will fill any capacity network link as soon as you have any applications that asks to do so. We have more and more such applications, and the buffers get bigger each hardware generation, though usually operated at a small fraction of that possible bandwidth. As soon as a network or network link reaches100% capacity, the usually grossly Continue reading
Virtual Cluster Switching (VCS) is Brocade's brand of datacenter ethernet switching. VCS allows for the creation of a network fabric that's capable of converging storage and data traffic via standards-based datacenter bridging. It also solves the “Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) problem” by implementing a standards-based TRILL data plane paired with their own control plane in the form of Fabric Shortest Path First (FSPF). This data + control plane enable the “routing” of MAC addresses through the fabric, negates the need for STP, enables the use of all cabled links, and prevents traffic loops. VCS is only (currently) available on the VDX line of switches from Brocade.
In this post I'm going to outline five aspects of VCS that I found particularly interesting or unique. This is a companion article to an earlier one titled Five Functional Facts about FabricPath where I broke down five features of Cisco's fabric technology.
The CoDel AQM algorithm by Kathie Nichols and Van Jacobson provides us with an essential missing tool to control queues properly. This work is the culmination of their at three major attempts to solve the problems with AQM algorithms over the last 14 years.
Eric Dumazet wrote the codel queuing discipline (based on a quick prototype by Dave Täht, who spent the last year working 60 hour weeks on bufferbloat) which landed in net-next a week or two ago; yesterday, net-next was merged into the Linux mainline for inclusion in the next Linux release. Eric also implemented a fq_codel queuing discipline, combining fair queuing and CoDel (pronounced “coddle”), and it works very well. The CoDel implementation was dual licensed BSD/GPL to help the *BSD community. Eric and others have tested CoDel on 10G Ethernet interfaces; as expected, CoDel performance is good in what’s been tested to date.
Linux 3.5 will likely release in August. So it was less than a month from first access to the algorithm (which was formally published in the AQM Queue May 6) to Linux mainline; it should be about four total from availability of the algorithm to Linux release. Not bad at all :-).
Felix Fietkau Continue reading
