A few updates on cake and make-wifi-fast

Posted Oct 24, 2021 18:59 UTC (Sun) by hub (guest, #154941)
In reply to: A few updates on cake and make-wifi-fast by mtaht
Parent article: Let them run CAKE

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.

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A few updates on cake and make-wifi-fast

Posted Oct 25, 2021 12:23 UTC (Mon) by mtaht (guest, #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 (guest, #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...