tc-cake(8) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | SHAPER PARAMETERS | OVERHEAD COMPENSATION PARAMETERS | ROUND TRIP TIME PARAMETERS | FLOW ISOLATION PARAMETERS | PRIORITY QUEUE PARAMETERS | OTHER PARAMETERS | OVERRIDING CLASSIFICATION WITH TC FILTERS | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | AUTHORS | COLOPHON

CAKE(8)                           Linux                          CAKE(8)

NAME         top

       CAKE - Common Applications Kept Enhanced (CAKE)

SYNOPSIS         top

       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         top

       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         top

       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         top

       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.

   Manual Overhead Specification
       overhead BYTES
            Adds BYTES to the size of each packet.  BYTES may be
       negative; values between -64 and 256 (inclusive) are accepted.

       mpu BYTES
            Rounds each packet (including overhead) up to a minimum
       length BYTES. BYTES may not be negative; values between 0 and 256
       (inclusive) are accepted.

       atm
            Compensates for ATM cell framing, which is normally found on
       ADSL links.  This is performed after the overhead parameter
       above.  ATM uses fixed 53-byte cells, each of which can carry 48
       bytes payload.

       ptm
            Compensates for PTM encoding, which is normally found on
       VDSL2 links and uses a 64b/65b encoding scheme. It is even more
       efficient to simply derate the specified shaper bandwidth by a
       factor of 64/65 or 0.984. See ITU G.992.3 Annex N and IEEE 802.3
       Section 61.3 for details.

       noatm
            Disables ATM and PTM compensation.

   Failsafe Overhead Keywords
       These two keywords are provided for quick-and-dirty setup.  Use
       them if you can't be bothered to read the rest of this section.

       raw (default)
            Turns off all overhead compensation in CAKE.  The packet
       size reported by Linux will be used directly.

            Other overhead keywords may be added after "raw".  The
       effect of this is to make the overhead compensation operate
       relative to the reported packet size, not the underlying IP
       packet size.

       conservative
            Compensates for more overhead than is likely to occur on any
       widely-deployed link technology.
            Equivalent to overhead 48 atm.

   ADSL Overhead Keywords
       Most ADSL modems have a way to check which framing scheme is in
       use.  Often this is also specified in the settings document
       provided by the ISP.  The keywords in this section are intended
       to correspond with these sources of information.  All of them
       implicitly set the atm flag.

       pppoa-vcmux
            Equivalent to overhead 10 atm

       pppoa-llc
            Equivalent to overhead 14 atm

       pppoe-vcmux
            Equivalent to overhead 32 atm

       pppoe-llcsnap
            Equivalent to overhead 40 atm

       bridged-vcmux
            Equivalent to overhead 24 atm

       bridged-llcsnap
            Equivalent to overhead 32 atm

       ipoa-vcmux
            Equivalent to overhead 8 atm

       ipoa-llcsnap
            Equivalent to overhead 16 atm

       See also the Ethernet Correction Factors section below.

   VDSL2 Overhead Keywords
       ATM was dropped from VDSL2 in favour of PTM, which is a much more
       straightforward framing scheme.  Some ISPs retained PPPoE for
       compatibility with their existing back-end systems.

       pppoe-ptm
            Equivalent to overhead 30 ptm

            PPPoE: 2B PPP + 6B PPPoE +
            ETHERNET: 6B dest MAC + 6B src MAC + 2B ethertype + 4B Frame
       Check Sequence +
            PTM: 1B Start of Frame (S) + 1B End of Frame (Ck) + 2B TC-
       CRC (PTM-FCS)

       bridged-ptm
            Equivalent to overhead 22 ptm
            ETHERNET: 6B dest MAC + 6B src MAC + 2B ethertype + 4B Frame
       Check Sequence +
            PTM: 1B Start of Frame (S) + 1B End of Frame (Ck) + 2B TC-
       CRC (PTM-FCS)

       See also the Ethernet Correction Factors section below.

   DOCSIS Cable Overhead Keyword
       DOCSIS is the universal standard for providing Internet service
       over cable-TV infrastructure.

       In this case, the actual on-wire overhead is less important than
       the packet size the head-end equipment uses for shaping and
       metering.  This is specified to be an Ethernet frame including
       the CRC (aka FCS).

       docsis
            Equivalent to overhead 18 mpu 64 noatm

   Ethernet Overhead Keywords
       ethernet
            Accounts for Ethernet's preamble, inter-frame gap, and Frame
       Check Sequence.  Use this keyword when the bottleneck being
       shaped for is an actual Ethernet cable.
            Equivalent to overhead 38 mpu 84 noatm

       ether-vlan
            Adds 4 bytes to the overhead compensation, accounting for an
       IEEE 802.1Q VLAN header appended to the Ethernet frame header.
       NB: Some ISPs use one or even two of these within PPPoE; this
       keyword may be repeated as necessary to express this.

ROUND TRIP TIME PARAMETERS         top

       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         top

       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         top

       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         top

       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         top

       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.

       Tin override

               To assign a priority tin, the major number of the
       priority field needs to match the qdisc handle of the cake
       instance; if it does, the minor number will be interpreted as the
       tin index. For example, to classify all ICMP packets as 'bulk',
       the following filter can be used:

               # 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

       Flow hash override

               To override flow hashing, the classid can be set. CAKE
       will interpret the major number of the classid as the host hash
       used in host isolation mode, and the minor number as the flow
       hash used for flow-based queueing. One or both of those can be
       set, and will be used if the relevant flow isolation parameter is
       set (i.e., the major number will be ignored if CAKE is not
       configured in hosts mode, and the minor number will be ignored if
       CAKE is not configured in flows mode).

       This example will assign all ICMP packets to the first queue:

               # 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

       If only one of the host and flow overrides is set, CAKE will
       compute the other hash from the packet as normal. Note, however,
       that the host isolation mode works by assigning a host ID to the
       flow queue; so if overriding both host and flow, the same flow
       cannot have more than one host assigned. In addition, it is not
       possible to assign different source and destination host IDs
       through the override mechanism; if a host ID is assigned, it will
       be used as both source and destination host.

EXAMPLES         top

       # 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

       After some use:
       # 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         top

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

AUTHORS         top

       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
       <[email protected]>.

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the iproute2 (utilities for controlling
       TCP/IP networking and traffic) project.  Information about the
       project can be found at 
       ⟨http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networking/iproute2⟩.
       If you have a bug report for this manual page, send it to
       [email protected], [email protected].  This page was
       obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/network/iproute2/iproute2.git⟩ on
       2024-06-14.  (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
       that was found in the repository was 2024-06-11.)  If you
       discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page,
       or you believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for
       the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the
       information in this COLOPHON (which is not part of the original
       manual page), send a mail to [email protected]

iproute2                      19 July 2018                       CAKE(8)

Pages that refer to this page: systemd.network(5)tc(8)tc-ctinfo(8)