Re: ALTQ modifications proposal

> On 18 Jun 2025, at 7:22 PM, Paul Goyette <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 18 Jun 2025, Emmanuel Nyarko wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I have already spoken to a few developers about this and now want to make everyone aware.
>> 
>> The current state of ALTQ:
>> ALTQ code is very large with so maany queueing disciplines.
>> 
>> The state of the art per my research is Fair Queuing CoDel FQ-Codel.(i did the work in making CoDel work in netbsd).
>> 
>> The previous disciplines are not well maintained and adding another discipline makes it worse(maintainability).
>> 
>> i want to update it to FQ-CoDel and bring it in now so we use it as our primary and maybe only active queue managements.
>> 
>> How do i want to bring it in ?
>> 1. Remove all the existing disciplines (openBSD has taken this step already)
>> 2. Use fq-codel which is easy to configure with fewer parameters and proves to be very effecitve in mitigating bufferbloat
>> 3. modularize it (so we don’t have to recompile kernel anytime one wants to use it. as opposed to the current)
>> 4. find a way to write tests for it
>> 5. update the docs.
>> 
>> Modularizing:
>> this will also help for easy integration into NPF.
>> all points of contacts to ALTQ will be changed to agree with the decision eg: in if_inittialise( when a new network device is connected) and also when detached for each network interface.
>> 
>> 
>> Hence, we can have a modular, and smaller quality of service codebase to use and maintain.
> 
> Please note that we also need to modularize the ALTQ code itself, preferably prior to modularizing the queueing disciplines.  I looked
> at it once a while ago, but did not proceed due to lack of knowledge
> re ALTQ itself.

Yess, also get it in rump too. Modularizing it as it is now is complex. we will even have to remove some #ifdef blocks in the network stack as well.

so i just want to have just codel. no #ifdef blocks, just either simple have it in base during boot, or modload it when you need it.
> 
> Good luck!
> 
> 
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Emmanuel