netem: rate extension

Currently netem is not in the ability to emulate channel bandwidth. Only static
delay (and optional random jitter) can be configured.

To emulate the channel rate the token bucket filter (sch_tbf) can be used.  But
TBF has some major emulation flaws. The buffer (token bucket depth/rate) cannot
be 0. Also the idea behind TBF is that the credit (token in buckets) fills if
no packet is transmitted. So that there is always a "positive" credit for new
packets. In real life this behavior contradicts the law of nature where
nothing can travel faster as speed of light. E.g.: on an emulated 1000 byte/s
link a small IPv4/TCP SYN packet with ~50 byte require ~0.05 seconds - not 0
seconds.

Netem is an excellent place to implement a rate limiting feature: static
delay is already implemented, tfifo already has time information and the
user can skip TBF configuration completely.

This patch implement rate feature which can be configured via tc. e.g:

	tc qdisc add dev eth0 root netem rate 10kbit

To emulate a link of 5000byte/s and add an additional static delay of 10ms:

	tc qdisc add dev eth0 root netem delay 10ms rate 5KBps

Note: similar to TBF the rate extension is bounded to the kernel timing
system. Depending on the architecture timer granularity, higher rates (e.g.
10mbit/s and higher) tend to transmission bursts. Also note: further queues
living in network adaptors; see ethtool(8).

Signed-off-by: Hagen Paul Pfeifer <hagen@jauu.net>
Acked-by: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@drr.davemloft.net>
2 files changed