ALTQ and PPP access concentrator

[Max Laier]

On Saturday 15 October 2005 16:24, Gleb Smirnoff wrote:
>   I've got two problems when running ALTQ on PPP access
> concentrator. May be you have ideas on how to solve them
> in a nice way.
>
>   - When pf.conf is parsed at boot time, the p2p interfaces
> (ng_iface(4) in my case) do not exist, so the ALTQ queues
> are not created. The PPP software (mpd in my case) usually
> starts at later stage of boot. Moreover, some programs like
> ppp(8) create interfaces dynamically, not at boot time.
>
>   - The PPP access concentrator may have a lot of interfaces.
> Why isn't it possible to specify same ALTQ policy on all
> interfaces of given type, like this:
>
>   altq on ng* priq bandwidth 56Kb queue { cvsup def dns ack ssh }
>
>   Instead, one needs to copy and paste a lot of lines differing
> only in interface unit number.

I agree that ALTQ configuration (esp for big setups) has some limitations and 
gotchas as is.  I'd like to take the opportunity to start a discussion about 
what features are required to make it more useable.  It is certainly 
interesting to look at decoupling /dev/pf and altq configuration.  The end 
result would be a (in-kernel) lookup service that allows pf (or any other 
end-user of ALTQ) to lookup QIDs by interface:qname.  In order to keep things 
in sync I am thinking of a eventhandler of some kind.

This would allow us to keep the inlined configuration as it happens right now 
(just a little rewriting in pfctl), but enable easy changes for interfaces 
coming late.  mpd would just trigger necessary altq-configuration from its 
UP-script.

I talked about this with green some time ago - CCed.

-- 
/"\  Best regards,                      | mlaier at freebsd.org
\ /  Max Laier                          | ICQ #67774661
 X   http://pf4freebsd.love2party.net/  | mlaier at EFnet
/ \  ASCII Ribbon Campaign              | Against HTML Mail and News
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-pf/attachments/20051015/57cdd6d9/attachment.bin