Dave Täht RIP

[Posted April 1, 2025 by corbet]

From the LibreQoS site comes the sad news that Dave Täht has passed away. Among many other things, he bears a lot of credit for our networks functioning as well as they do. "We're incredibly grateful to have Dave as our friend, mentor, and as someone who continuously inspired us – showing us that we could do better for each other in the world, and leverage technology to make that happen. He will be dearly missed".

Searching through LWN's archives will turn up many references to his work fixing WiFi, improving queue management, tackling bufferbloat, and more. Farewell, Dave, we hope the music is good wherever you are.

(Thanks to Jon Masters for the heads-up).

Very sad. RIP Dave

Posted Apr 1, 2025 20:10 UTC (Tue) by lwnuser573 (subscriber, #134940) [Link]

Very sad. RIP Dave

Battlemesh

Posted Apr 1, 2025 21:13 UTC (Tue) by zoobab (guest, #9945) [Link]

Dave gave a talk about Starlink at Battlemesh in 2019, we had some good beers:

https://media.freifunk.net/v/lightning-talk-starlink

Rest in peace in networking heaven.

Life is short, he left too early.

oh no!

Posted Apr 1, 2025 21:19 UTC (Tue) by dankamongmen (subscriber, #35141) [Link]

dave was a super friendly and informative guy. his passion for reducing bufferbloat was inspiring. i'm glad CAKE and BBR got into the wild and proven before he passed.

RIP Dave

Posted Apr 1, 2025 23:10 UTC (Tue) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link]

Oh this is sad, Dave reached out to us via our user support system when he saw a note about us using fq_codel because he wanted to know how it was going. He had a very illuminating discussion with a colleague of mine and it was so kind of him to share his knowledge with us.

Thank you Dave

Posted Apr 2, 2025 5:23 UTC (Wed) by wsy (subscriber, #121706) [Link]

Dave's work changed my understanding of latency, bandwith and queues. What a great loss.

Rest in peace, Dave

Posted Apr 2, 2025 7:17 UTC (Wed) by koenkooi (subscriber, #71861) [Link]

I hope he's found a nice tropical beach to rest on in his afterlife! Running into him at various conferences was always a relaxed experience and he never forgot to mention things like "Hey, that new board you're working on, make sure you have BQL support in your network drivers!"
His work on fq_codel, CAKE and other things are not just useful for my home network, they also helped tremendously at my previous job, optimizing ceph itself is practically impossible, but you can optimize the the network it runs on!

RIP

Posted Apr 2, 2025 9:13 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

You moved the needle. Thanks Dave.

RIP Dave...

Posted Apr 2, 2025 9:22 UTC (Wed) by pomac (subscriber, #94901) [Link]

I still remember the first time i met him, there was a test you had to pass before he'd talk to you... Something that i keep bringing up at times as well, it was funny and unexpected at the time =)

on LWN...

Posted Apr 2, 2025 10:53 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (1 responses)

> Searching through LWN's archives will turn up many references to his work

He also posted many comments under the user name mtaht. Always helpful and informative.

on LWN...

Posted Apr 2, 2025 12:35 UTC (Wed) by zoobab (guest, #9945) [Link]

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=site%3Alwn.net+mtaht&...

Rest In Peace, Dave!

Posted Apr 2, 2025 12:48 UTC (Wed) by unixbhaskar (guest, #44758) [Link]

Ah, the world gets a little dimmer 😞

Rip Dave

Posted Apr 2, 2025 12:55 UTC (Wed) by LizzyLinux (guest, #176799) [Link]

this guy sounds cool.
Too bad he passed so soon.

RIP

Posted Apr 3, 2025 13:55 UTC (Thu) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779) [Link]

RIP Dave. Only someone as practical-minded as you could change your surname from Taht to Täht to avoid people misspelling it “That” :-) And only someone as persistent and stubborn as you could make fq_codel and CAKE as widespread as they are—not by coding them, but for the infinite education and outreach.

Thank you, Dave.

Posted Apr 3, 2025 22:12 UTC (Thu) by tb (subscriber, #145039) [Link]

This is such sad news.

I hadn't heard his name in a few years, but it showing up today made me realize I owe my career to Dave. If it wasn't for his bufferbloat work, I wouldn't have gotten big into Linux, and I probably wouldn't be working on bpf today.

Dave, you will be missed, but you won't be forgotten.