Hi,

Some background:

The WRT1900ACv1 (which has been shipping for 6 months or so) is based on Marvell Armada XP, which uses a packet processor. There is no support for this in the generic Linux kernel, which means performance is a lot lower with the generic kernel compared to the "special" kernel which has patches and where you use the Marvell SDK to compile it to support the packet processor. With the generic kernel, you get CPU only based forwarding which is around 300-500 megabit/s of TCP.

Now, with WRT1200AC and WRT1900ACv2 which was released in the last few weeks or so and just now becoming more widely available, they've changed to Marvell Armada 385 which is the beefiest packet forwarding generic CPU I have ever heard of or encountered in a "home gateway" kind of package. I have an WRT1200AC for testing I received this week, and so far I have been able to verify that it does 940 megabit/s of TCP (iperf) with the generic kernel shipped with OpenWRT CC with the below default qdisc. It seems to do this using approximately 25% CPU.

So what I would like to do now is try to push it a little bit harder, so if someone could give me an example of a more punishing qdisc setup and test to run through it, that would be very interesting.

But so far, the Armada 385 chipset (and I hope we'll see more devices based on it) seems to be a perfect platform for bufferbload testing and development. Yes, it's a lot pricier than the WNDR3800 that for instance CeroWRT uses, but on the other hand, it seems to have 10x the performance of that box, and everything seems to work right out of the box without any special patches.

On Sun, 14 Jun 2015, Dave Taht wrote:

a wider audience for the issues in new consumer hardware seems desirable.

forwarding with permission.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dave Taht <[email protected]>
Date: Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 8:41 AM
Subject: Re: performance testing on the WRT1200AC
To: Mikael Abrahamsson <[email protected]>, Aaron Wood <[email protected]>


Dear Mikael:

netperf-wrapper has been renamed to flent. :) Quite a bit of new stuff
is dropping into it, one of my favorite tests is the new qdisc_stats
test (which I run at the same time as another test). It hasn't been
tested on a multi-queue interface (and doesn't work with openwrt's sh
implementation dang it). But do a pull anyway. :)

On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 8:18 AM, Mikael Abrahamsson <[email protected]> wrote:

Hi,

I want to do some more demanding testing of the WRT1200AC. Currently it's
running a few days old openwrt CC. It comes with the below qdisc setting. I
will be testing it using the following setup:

linux-switch-wrt1200ac-linux

All links above are gigabit ethernet links.

My plan is to for instance run netperf-wrapper with a few different tests.

Would it strain the WRT1200AC if I configured it to shape to 900 megabit/s
bidirectionallty? I guess in order to actually achieve a little bit of

My original tests with the 1900AC showed htb peaking out with sqm +
offloads at about 550/650mbit on the rrul test. (I can't remember if
nat was on or off, but I think off)

but that was months ago. I have a huge hope that cake will do better
on this platform and recently (yesterday) I think got that to the
point where we could push it to openwrt to be built regularly.

Aaron, cc'd, has done quite a bit of work with the 1900, and I think
he started running into trouble at 200mbit.

buffering, I'm going to have to run below wirespeed? Because I can't get
more than 1 gigabit/s of traffic to the wrt1200ac because of above layout,
so doing bidirectional shaping to 900 on eth0 (WAN PORT) would at least give
it a bit more to do and also give a chance to induce some buffering?

Ain't it a bitch? A thought would be to also exercise the wifi a bit
to drive it past gigE overall. So have two clients running flent tests
simultaneously, one on wifi, one on ethernet, and there you go,
driving it into overload.

Do you have some other ideas for testing? I am mostly interested in making
sure the CPU is fast enough to do AQM at gig speeds...

Well, there are other issues.

A) The mvneta ethernet driver in the 1900 did not support BQL when
last I looked, supplying insufficient backpressure to the upper
layers.

B) The multiqueued hardware applies a bit of fq for you automagically,
BUT, even if BQL was in place, BQL's buffering is additive per
hardware queue, so it tends to

what I saw was nearly no drops in the qdisc. I don't think I even saw
maxpacket grow (a sure sign you are backlogging in the qdisc) I ended
up disabling the hardware mq multiqueue[1] stuff entirely by "tc qdisc
add dev eth0 root fq_codel", and even then, see A) - but I did finally
see maxpacket grow...

C) to realize to my horror that they had very aggressively implemented
GRO for everything, giving us 64k "packets" to deal with coming in
from the gigE ethernet... which interacted rather badly with the
10Mbit outgoing interface I had at the time.

and that explained why nearly all the QoS systems as deployed in this
generation of router were doing so badly...

which led to a change in codel's control law (upstream in linux, not
sure in openwrt), and ultimately frantic activity in cake to do
peeling apart of superpackets like that.

I applaud further testing, and I would love it if you could verify
that the GRO problem remains and that it's hard to get sufficient
backpressure (and latencies should grow a lot) when driven with wifi+
ethernet

On simple single threaded up or down tests I was able to get full gigE
throughput out of the 1900's wan interface, but disabling offloads was
quite damaging, as was mixed traffic like rrul_50 up, which makes GRO
far less effective.

I wish I had time to go and add BQL. I requested it of the author, no response.


root@OpenWrt:/tmp# tc qdisc

tc -s qdisc show # -s is more revealing

qdisc mq 0: dev eth0 root
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev eth0 parent :1 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev eth0 parent :2 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev eth0 parent :3 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev eth0 parent :4 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev eth0 parent :5 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev eth0 parent :6 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev eth0 parent :7 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev eth0 parent :8 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc mq 0: dev eth1 root
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev eth1 parent :1 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev eth1 parent :2 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev eth1 parent :3 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev eth1 parent :4 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev eth1 parent :5 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev eth1 parent :6 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev eth1 parent :7 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev eth1 parent :8 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc mq 0: dev wlan0 root
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev wlan0 parent :1 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev wlan0 parent :2 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev wlan0 parent :3 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn
qdisc fq_codel 0: dev wlan0 parent :4 limit 1024p flows 1024 quantum 300
target 5.0ms interval 100.0ms ecn


--
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: [email protected]



--
Dave Täht
What will it take to vastly improve wifi for everyone?
https://plus.google.com/u/0/explore/makewififast


--
Dave Täht
What will it take to vastly improve wifi for everyone?
https://plus.google.com/u/0/explore/makewififast
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Mikael Abrahamsson    email: [email protected]
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