Let them run CAKE

Posted Feb 8, 2019 4:19 UTC (Fri) by arlan (guest, #130310)
Parent article: Let them run CAKE

It's been a while since I've seen anything posted about CAKE. Addressing buffer bloat for my Home network (Charter Cable) and my business network (Charter Business) was pretty well resolved with IQ Routers. Stupidly simple.

I run Software Defined Radios across the Internet where buffer bloat causes severe latency issues for both Voice (drop out) and our Panadapter displays (jitter).

Next with a Cellular Router where bandwidth is always changing as well as the number of bonded links available may be limited (metro areas) this was a much more severe issue. Working with Jonathan Morton's CAKE on the cellular router (it came pre-installed - Mofi Networks Cellular Router (Canada) - with OpenWRT), I also searched for a good guide to configuring it.

With no real luck finding a guide, I thought I'll try the "Just A Piece of Cake" configuration included and much to my surprise it works just great. Utterly simple, but it's done the job quite well.

In rural areas where a number of bonded links are available I saw (fixed position) as much as 60 Mb download speeds and low latency. In the middle of Utah (sic no where) at 85 MPH I saw 30 Mbs/6 Mbs speeds with acceptable latency. Yes, the legal speed limit is 85 and the F-250 has a 90 MPH governor. LOL This is on AT&T's rural Internet Access plan (unlimited, never throttled), widely used by cross country truckers and retire's in their motor homes. See Ubifi Networks. With the WiFi interface to our iPhones and iPads our Verizon Cellular rarely get used... It's certainly better than DSL and we streamed HBO movies without a glitch in remote places that had AT&T cellular service. CAKE works... for me.

This was April 2018, so I haven't tried the latest release of patches (May 2018) noted in your post. Looking forward to seeing how that works.

A few updates on cake and make-wifi-fast

Posted Apr 21, 2020 19:37 UTC (Tue) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link] (4 responses)

The evenroute v3 (which has fq_codel for wifi and the latest version of cake) is benchmarking out beautifully. This is a recent test (with 100 users online, at least one of whom competing with that test):

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/62398495

Which is comparable, of course, all the other openwrt/dd-wrt and linux based routers that can run cake, (thousands!!), but the evenroute has the first autotuner I've yet seen work without manual tweaking. Very happy with the (mt76) wifi on the evenroute v3, also. I may well shift future development efforts in the make-wifi-fast project over to the 802.11ax mediatek chips.

The cake backport to the edgerouters is working out well also. SQM (also cake based) on the eeros is bugging me because they don't do dsl framing compensation, but if you have an eero, turn it on....

ALSO (on the wifi front)

We FINALLY got the AQL patches into openwrt head last month for the QCA ath10k related chips (and a few thousand routers that use that), and I hope we get more testers of that in the coming weeks.

( https://forum.openwrt.org/t/aql-and-the-ath10k-is-lovely/ )

I hope these algorithms contribute to familial harmony in these times of troubles, and that... perhaps a few of y'all out there will reflash some routers for friends and family suffering from jitter and delay when more than one of you is online.

The evenroute v4 is coming out soon

Posted Sep 13, 2021 16:06 UTC (Mon) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link]

As much as I try to encourage folk to install their own software on their own routers, it really does pay to have an off-the-shelf solution you can recommend to your parents, or a business.

There are dozens upon dozens of these, now, but very few that scale up to a gbit or higher.

The evenroute v4 is due out soon, runs cake and most of the latest openwrt stuff at a gbit+ without breaking a sweat, and they are taking pre-orders now:

https://evenroute.com/iqrouter-pro

A few updates on cake and make-wifi-fast

Posted Oct 24, 2021 18:59 UTC (Sun) by hub (guest, #154941) [Link] (2 responses)

Hi Dave,

I've only been following your work for the last several months, but I am thoroughly impressed with CAKE and fq_codel. I'm so appreciative that people like you and Jim Gettys are sharing your knowledge across the internet, and I've subscribed to your Starlink list to learn more from you and other contributors.

I tried CAKE with Fresh Tomato on the old Asus RT-AC68u. Then I tried Eero's implementation on the older AC pro models. It's unfortunate they still haven't added SQM for the new eero 6 models even in their recent 6.5 release.

More recently, I discovered the Belkin RT3200/Linksys E8450, and I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised when you get your hands on one of thees. This router contains a new 64 bit Mediatek chipset and an unlocked bootloader that has allowed fast OpenWrt development and incredible SQM performance. This currently seems like the fastest CAKE solution available short of x86. The Belkin version is on the shelves at just about every Wal-mart store, and Wal-mart seems to drop the price to around $80 during Belkin sales. At worst the 5GHz Wifi antennas seem to underperform compared to everything else that is so great with this router, including 160 Hz AX support and DFS in OpenWrt LuCI.

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/belkin-rt3200-linksys-e8450-w...

Like you, I'm quite disappointed at the state of Wifi 6 in the market. Not only is CAKE missing across the board, it seems like none of the stability that 802.11ac wave 2 eventually achieved has carried over into current firmwares for these new devices. I even tried the Netgear RAX120 with v2 of its Qualcomm 64 bit 14nm chip, and it's still a rebooting, unstable nightmare. I couldn't possibly hold out for OpenWrt support on that device.

If a novice like me is allowed to offer any criticism at all of the current CAKE implementation in OpenWrt, it merely to agree with you in regards to the challenge of applying CAKE to such a variable bandwidth connection as Starlink. As you suggested on /r/Starlink, the ideal solution would involve the Starlink team coordinating info about available bandwidth from the SOC in Dishy with a local CAKE solution on their provided OpenWrt Qualcomm IPQ4018 router. But I do hope some determined devs can tap into the unrealized power of this new Mediatek processor in the Belkin RT3200 to automatically adjust to Starlink and LTE connections' changing speeds more readily.

Thanks again, Dave. It's great when I stumble upon more of your advice in the comments section anywhere people might listen.

A few updates on cake and make-wifi-fast

Posted Oct 25, 2021 12:23 UTC (Mon) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link] (1 responses)

thx for the kind note! A couple notes:

Jim essentially has retired, after firing his last shot here:
https://gettys.wordpress.com/2018/02/11/the-blind-men-and...

There are 100s of people active in the bufferbloat project(s), I'm just one of the most visible. My goal of late has been to get the technologies developed by our project to cross the chasm into mainstream gear - while openwrt remains the bleeding edge here for new chipsets, trying to get mikrotik, eero, apple, starlink, etc to do the right thing is mostly what I do these days, although I do wish dearly I could get in there again to push things ahead further forward.

The cake team (led by jonathan morton) has largely been distracted by the SCE vs L4S debate in the ietf, the former make-wifi-fast team leader (toke) is off doing ebpf stuff mostly.

Doing some sort of dynamic adjustment to cake based on statistics several folks are working on.

The hope really was that vendors would lay our algorithms close to the hardware where they belonged - and in the starlink encounter, in particular, it seemed like the dishy was one kernel compile away from doing most of the right things, and that fixing their router's wifi, also... but so far, no news from them. Nor usable stats.

(I retell that story as humorously as possible here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9gLo6Xrwgw )

The mt76 in openwrt seems solidifying! thx for the steer to the link. And eero and apple at least seem to be moving finally in the right direction.

As for ISPs, see also: https://github.com/rchac/LibreQoS/

cake on lte

Posted Nov 8, 2021 18:15 UTC (Mon) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link]

There's been some good work on getting cake to work better over LTE. More testers needed here: https://forum.openwrt.org/t/cake-w-adaptive-bandwidth/108...

samknows and ookla join in on measuring latency under load

Posted Aug 26, 2022 8:27 UTC (Fri) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link]

This piece on bufferbloat, including some of the history with vint cerf and jim gettys, by samknows, was really good. apparently US DSL has an average latency under load of 853ms. Also ookla is now measuring working latency with their latest app and web tests. Cake looks really good on these tests, but hilariously, so far the general public hasn't noticed the new numbers it produces.

There was a starlink test in some article or another that had 3 seconds of LUL on it....