NAME¶

CAKE - Common Applications Kept Enhanced (CAKE)

SYNOPSIS¶

tc qdisc ... cake
[ bandwidth RATE | unlimited* | autorate-ingress ]
[ rtt TIME | datacentre | lan | metro | regional | internet* | oceanic | satellite | interplanetary ]
[ besteffort | diffserv8 | diffserv4 | diffserv3* ]
[ flowblind | srchost | dsthost | hosts | flows | dual-srchost | dual-dsthost | triple-isolate* ]
[ nat | nonat* ]
[ wash | nowash* ]
[ split-gso* | no-split-gso ]
[ ack-filter | ack-filter-aggressive | no-ack-filter* ]
[ memlimit LIMIT ]
[ fwmark MASK ]
[ ptm | atm | noatm* ]
[ overhead N | conservative | raw* ]
[ mpu N ]
[ ingress | egress* ]
(* marks defaults)

DESCRIPTION¶

CAKE (Common Applications Kept Enhanced) is a shaping-capable queue discipline which uses both AQM and FQ. It combines COBALT, which is an AQM algorithm combining Codel and BLUE, a shaper which operates in deficit mode, and a variant of DRR++ for flow isolation. 8-way set-associative hashing is used to virtually eliminate hash collisions. Priority queuing is available through a simplified diffserv implementation. Overhead compensation for various encapsulation schemes is tightly integrated.

All settings are optional; the default settings are chosen to be sensible in most common deployments. Most people will only need to set the bandwidth parameter to get useful results, but reading the Overhead Compensation and Round Trip Time sections is strongly encouraged.

SHAPER PARAMETERS¶

CAKE uses a deficit-mode shaper, which does not exhibit the initial burst typical of token-bucket shapers. It will automatically burst precisely as much as required to maintain the configured throughput. As such, it is very straightforward to configure.

unlimited (default)

No limit on the bandwidth.

bandwidth RATE

Set the shaper bandwidth. See tc(8) or examples below for details of the RATE value.

autorate-ingress

Automatic capacity estimation based on traffic arriving at this qdisc. This is most likely to be useful with cellular links, which tend to change quality randomly. A bandwidth parameter can be used in conjunction to specify an initial estimate. The shaper will periodically be set to a bandwidth slightly below the estimated rate. This estimator cannot estimate the bandwidth of links downstream of itself.

OVERHEAD COMPENSATION PARAMETERS¶

The size of each packet on the wire may differ from that seen by Linux. The following parameters allow CAKE to compensate for this difference by internally considering each packet to be bigger than Linux informs it. To assist users who are not expert network engineers, keywords have been provided to represent a number of common link technologies.

ROUND TRIP TIME PARAMETERS¶

Active Queue Management (AQM) consists of embedding congestion signals in the packet flow, which receivers use to instruct senders to slow down when the queue is persistently occupied. CAKE uses ECN signalling when available, and packet drops otherwise, according to a combination of the Codel and BLUE AQM algorithms called COBALT.

Very short latencies require a very rapid AQM response to adequately control latency. However, such a rapid response tends to impair throughput when the actual RTT is relatively long. CAKE allows specifying the RTT it assumes for tuning various parameters. Actual RTTs within an order of magnitude of this will generally work well for both throughput and latency management.

At the 'lan' setting and below, the time constants are similar in magnitude to the jitter in the Linux kernel itself, so congestion might be signalled prematurely. The flows will then become sparse and total throughput reduced, leaving little or no back-pressure for the fairness logic to work against. Use the "metro" setting for local lans unless you have a custom kernel.

rtt TIME

Manually specify an RTT.

datacentre

For extremely high-performance 10GigE+ networks only.
Equivalent to rtt 100us.

lan

For pure Ethernet (not Wi-Fi) networks, at home or in the office. Don't use this when shaping for an Internet access link.
Equivalent to rtt 1ms.

metro

For traffic mostly within a single city.
Equivalent to rtt 10ms.

regional

For traffic mostly within a European-sized country.
Equivalent to rtt 30ms.

internet (default)

This is suitable for most Internet traffic.
Equivalent to rtt 100ms.

oceanic

For Internet traffic with generally above-average latency, such as that suffered by Australasian residents.
Equivalent to rtt 300ms.

satellite

For traffic via geostationary satellites.
Equivalent to rtt 1000ms.

interplanetary

So named because Jupiter is about 1 light-hour from Earth. Use this to (almost) completely disable AQM actions.
Equivalent to rtt 3600s.

FLOW ISOLATION PARAMETERS¶

With flow isolation enabled, CAKE places packets from different flows into different queues, each of which carries its own AQM state. Packets from each queue are then delivered fairly, according to a DRR++ algorithm which minimizes latency for "sparse" flows. CAKE uses a set-associative hashing algorithm to minimize flow collisions.

These keywords specify whether fairness based on source address, destination address, individual flows, or any combination of those is desired.

flowblind

Disables flow isolation; all traffic passes through a single queue for each tin.

srchost

Flows are defined only by source address. Could be useful on the egress path of an ISP backhaul.

dsthost

Flows are defined only by destination address. Could be useful on the ingress path of an ISP backhaul.

hosts

Flows are defined by source-destination host pairs. This is host isolation, rather than flow isolation.

flows

Flows are defined by the entire 5-tuple of source address, destination address, transport protocol, source port and destination port. This is the type of flow isolation performed by SFQ and fq_codel.

dual-srchost

Flows are defined by the 5-tuple, and fairness is applied first over source addresses, then over individual flows. Good for use on egress traffic from a LAN to the internet, where it'll prevent any one LAN host from monopolising the uplink, regardless of the number of flows they use.

dual-dsthost

Flows are defined by the 5-tuple, and fairness is applied first over destination addresses, then over individual flows. Good for use on ingress traffic to a LAN from the internet, where it'll prevent any one LAN host from monopolising the downlink, regardless of the number of flows they use.

triple-isolate (default)

Flows are defined by the 5-tuple, and fairness is applied over source *and* destination addresses intelligently (ie. not merely by host-pairs), and also over individual flows. Use this if you're not certain whether to use dual-srchost or dual-dsthost; it'll do both jobs at once, preventing any one host on *either* side of the link from monopolising it with a large number of flows.

nat

Instructs Cake to perform a NAT lookup before applying flow-isolation rules, to determine the true addresses and port numbers of the packet, to improve fairness between hosts "inside" the NAT. This has no practical effect in "flowblind" or "flows" modes, or if NAT is performed on a different host.

nonat (default)

Cake will not perform a NAT lookup. Flow isolation will be performed using the addresses and port numbers directly visible to the interface Cake is attached to.

PRIORITY QUEUE PARAMETERS¶

CAKE can divide traffic into "tins" based on the Diffserv field. Each tin has its own independent set of flow-isolation queues, and is serviced based on a WRR algorithm. To avoid perverse Diffserv marking incentives, tin weights have a "priority sharing" value when bandwidth used by that tin is below a threshold, and a lower "bandwidth sharing" value when above. Bandwidth is compared against the threshold using the same algorithm as the deficit-mode shaper.

Detailed customisation of tin parameters is not provided. The following presets perform all necessary tuning, relative to the current shaper bandwidth and RTT settings.

besteffort

Disables priority queuing by placing all traffic in one tin.

precedence

Enables legacy interpretation of TOS "Precedence" field. Use of this preset on the modern Internet is firmly discouraged.

diffserv4

Provides a general-purpose Diffserv implementation with four tins:

• Bulk (CS1, LE in kernel v5.9+), 6.25% threshold, generally low priority.
• Best Effort (general), 100% threshold.
• Video (AF4x, AF3x, CS3, AF2x, CS2, TOS4, TOS1), 50% threshold.
• Voice (CS7, CS6, EF, VA, CS5, CS4), 25% threshold.

diffserv3 (default)

Provides a simple, general-purpose Diffserv implementation with three tins:

• Bulk (CS1, LE in kernel v5.9+), 6.25% threshold, generally low priority.
• Best Effort (general), 100% threshold.
• Voice (CS7, CS6, EF, VA, TOS4), 25% threshold, reduced Codel interval.

fwmark MASK

This options turns on fwmark-based overriding of CAKE's tin selection. If set, the option specifies a bitmask that will be applied to the fwmark associated with each packet. If the result of this masking is non-zero, the result will be right-shifted by the number of least-significant unset bits in the mask value, and the result will be used as a the tin number for that packet. This can be used to set policies in a firewall script that will override CAKE's built-in tin selection.

OTHER PARAMETERS¶

ingress

Indicates that CAKE is running in ingress mode (i.e. running on the downlink of a connection). This changes the shaper to also count dropped packets as data transferred, as these will have already traversed the link before CAKE can choose what to do with them.

In addition, the AQM will be tuned to always keep at least two packets queued per flow. The reason for this is that retransmits are more expensive in ingress mode, since dropped packets have to traverse the link again; thus, keeping a minimum number of packets queued will improve throughput in cases where the number of active flows are so large that they saturate the link even at their minimum window size.

memlimit LIMIT

Limit the memory consumed by Cake to LIMIT bytes. Note that this does not translate directly to queue size (so do not size this based on bandwidth delay product considerations, but rather on worst case acceptable memory consumption), as there is some overhead in the data structures containing the packets, especially for small packets.

By default, the limit is calculated based on the bandwidth and RTT settings.

wash

Traffic entering your diffserv domain is frequently mis-marked in transit from the perspective of your network, and traffic exiting yours may be mis-marked from the perspective of the transiting provider.

Apply the wash option to clear all extra diffserv (but not ECN bits), after priority queuing has taken place.

If you are shaping inbound, and cannot trust the diffserv markings (as is the case for Comcast Cable, among others), it is best to use a single queue "besteffort" mode with wash.

split-gso

This option controls whether CAKE will split General Segmentation Offload (GSO) super-packets into their on-the-wire components and dequeue them individually.

Super-packets are created by the networking stack to improve efficiency. However, because they are larger they take longer to dequeue, which translates to higher latency for competing flows, especially at lower bandwidths. CAKE defaults to splitting GSO packets to achieve the lowest possible latency. At link speeds higher than 10 Gbps, setting the no-split-gso parameter can increase the maximum achievable throughput by retaining the full GSO packets.

OVERRIDING CLASSIFICATION WITH TC FILTERS¶

CAKE supports overriding of its internal classification of packets through the tc filter mechanism. Packets can be assigned to different priority tins by setting the priority field on the skb, and the flow hashing can be overridden by setting the classid parameter.

# tc qdisc replace dev eth0 handle 1: root cake diffserv3
# tc filter add dev eth0 parent 1: protocol ip prio 1 \


  u32 match icmp type 0 0 action skbedit priority 1:1

# tc qdisc replace dev eth0 handle 1: root cake
# tc filter add dev eth0 parent 1: protocol ip prio 1 \


  u32 match icmp type 0 0 classid 0:1

EXAMPLES¶

# tc qdisc delete root dev eth0
# tc qdisc add root dev eth0 cake bandwidth 100Mbit ethernet
# tc -s qdisc show dev eth0
qdisc cake 1: root refcnt 2 bandwidth 100Mbit diffserv3 triple-isolate rtt 100.0ms noatm overhead 38 mpu 84


 Sent 0 bytes 0 pkt (dropped 0, overlimits 0 requeues 0)


 backlog 0b 0p requeues 0


 memory used: 0b of 5000000b


 capacity estimate: 100Mbit


 min/max network layer size:        65535 /       0


 min/max overhead-adjusted size:    65535 /       0


 average network hdr offset:            0


                   Bulk  Best Effort        Voice


  thresh       6250Kbit      100Mbit       25Mbit


  target          5.0ms        5.0ms        5.0ms


  interval      100.0ms      100.0ms      100.0ms


  pk_delay          0us          0us          0us


  av_delay          0us          0us          0us


  sp_delay          0us          0us          0us


  pkts                0            0            0


  bytes               0            0            0


  way_inds            0            0            0


  way_miss            0            0            0


  way_cols            0            0            0


  drops               0            0            0


  marks               0            0            0


  ack_drop            0            0            0


  sp_flows            0            0            0


  bk_flows            0            0            0


  un_flows            0            0            0


  max_len             0            0            0


  quantum           300         1514          762

# tc -s qdisc show dev eth0
qdisc cake 1: root refcnt 2 bandwidth 100Mbit diffserv3 triple-isolate rtt 100.0ms noatm overhead 38 mpu 84


 Sent 44709231 bytes 31931 pkt (dropped 45, overlimits 93782 requeues 0)


 backlog 33308b 22p requeues 0


 memory used: 292352b of 5000000b


 capacity estimate: 100Mbit


 min/max network layer size:           28 /    1500


 min/max overhead-adjusted size:       84 /    1538


 average network hdr offset:           14


                   Bulk  Best Effort        Voice


  thresh       6250Kbit      100Mbit       25Mbit


  target          5.0ms        5.0ms        5.0ms


  interval      100.0ms      100.0ms      100.0ms


  pk_delay        8.7ms        6.9ms        5.0ms


  av_delay        4.9ms        5.3ms        3.8ms


  sp_delay        727us        1.4ms        511us


  pkts             2590        21271         8137


  bytes         3081804     30302659     11426206


  way_inds            0           46            0


  way_miss            3           17            4


  way_cols            0            0            0


  drops              20           15           10


  marks               0            0            0


  ack_drop            0            0            0


  sp_flows            2            4            1


  bk_flows            1            2            1


  un_flows            0            0            0


  max_len          1514         1514         1514


  quantum           300         1514          762

SEE ALSO¶

tc(8), tc-codel(8), tc-fq_codel(8), tc-htb(8)

AUTHORS¶

Cake's principal author is Jonathan Morton, with contributions from Tony Ambardar, Kevin Darbyshire-Bryant, Toke Høiland-Jørgensen, Sebastian Moeller, Ryan Mounce, Dean Scarff, Nils Andreas Svee, and Dave Täht.

This manual page was written by Loganaden Velvindron. Please report corrections to the Linux Networking mailing list <netdev@vger.kernel.org>.