Re: ALTQ for FreeBSD 5.1?

Bruno Afonso wrote:
> Holger Kipp wrote:
> > Isn't someone working on integrating ALTQ and pf - similar to what
> > has been done for OpenBSD?
> 
> here you go:
> 
> http://pf4freebsd.love2party.net/index.html
> 
> I'd love freebsd to have altq and pf or ipf integration on base system..

If it can be one as a kernel module, that's the way to do
it, instead of "integrating" it.  Alt-Q is experimental code,
and, as such, there is academic disagreement on whether it'd
be a good idea to integrate it in such a way as it could not
be removed.  Integrating pf that way would just break the
ability to use competing code, for political reasons that not
all of us would agree with.

So if the code's integratedat all, it should be done as modules.

FWIW: Alt-Q does nothing about impedence mismatches; for example,
if I have a fast local pipe on a machine acting as a gateway to
a slow connection to a much fater network (think NAT box on a
DMZ border hooked to a DSL or cable modem), then no matter what
I do with Alt-Q, I'm screwed at the network service providers
end by the buffer limitations and queueing policy between their
OC3 (or whatever) and their DSLM/cable fan out unit.  This is
because bandwidth usage is asymmetric: if I have two sets of
traffic, the NSP's router will fill its buffers alloted to me
with one type of traffic/one connections traffic.  After that,
I can Alt-Q until I'm blue in the face on my end, but without
me draining out the NSP's router's packet buffer, no new packets
of the right type will gets through.  The only way it works is if
the NSP is also running Alt-Q, and you have prereserved high water
marks for traffic bands, so that even if 90% of your allotted
buffers get filled up, there's still 10% reservation for ssh for
you to get into and talk to your machine.

I much prefer Julian Elischer's approach to solving this problem,
which doesn't require cooperation from the NSP.

So this recent hard push for Alt-Q in the base system as anything
other than a module is a really, really bad idea, in the opinions
of some of us.

-- Terry