> On 4 Jun, 2016, at 22:55, Jonathan Morton <chromati...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> COBALT should turn out to be a reasonable antidote to sender-side cheating, 
> due to the way BLUE works; the drop probability remains steady until the 
> queue has completely emptied, and then decays slowly.  Assuming the 
> congestion-control response to packet drops is normal, BLUE should find a 
> stable operating point where the queue is kept partly full on average.  The 
> resulting packet loss will be higher than for a dumb FIFO or a naive ECN AQM, 
> but lower than for a loss-based AQM with a tight sojourn-time target.
> 
> For this reason, I’m putting off drafting such an explanation to Valve until 
> I have a chance to evaluate COBALT’s performance against the faulty traffic.

The COBALTified Cake is now working quite nicely, after I located and excised 
some annoying lockup bugs.  As a side-effect of these fixes (which introduced a 
third, lightly-serviced flowchain for “decaying flows”, which are counted as 
“sparse” in the stats report), the sparse and bulk flow counts should be 
somewhat less jittery and more useful.

I replaced the defunct “last_len” stat with a new “un_flows”, meaning 
“unresponsive flows”, to indicate when the BLUE part of COBALT is active.  This 
lights up nicely when passing Steam traffic, which no longer has anywhere near 
as detrimental effect on my Internet connection as it did with only Codel; this 
indicates that BLUE’s ECN-blind dropping is successfully keeping the upstream 
queue empty.  (Of course it wouldn’t help against a UDP flood, but nothing can 
do that in this topology.)

While working on this, I also noticed that the triple-isolation logic is 
probably quite CPU-intensive.  It should be feasible to do better, so I’ll have 
a go at that soon.  Also on the to-do list is enhancing the overhead logic with 
new data, and adding a three-class Diffserv mode which Dave has wanted for a 
while.

I’ve also come up with a tentative experimental setup to test the “85% rule” 
more robustly than the Chinese paper found recently.  I should be able to do it 
wth just three hosts, one having dual NICs, and using only Cake and netem 
qdiscs.

Now if only the sauna were not the *coolest* part of my residence right now…

 - Jonathan Morton

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