I just noticed: http://www.bufferbloat.net/news/18 CeroWrt is a project to resolve endemic problems in home networking today, and to push the state of the art of edge networks and routers forward. Projects include tighter integration with DNSSEC, wireless mesh networking (Wisp6), measurements of networking and censorship issues (BISMark), among others, notably reducing bufferbloat in both the wired and wireless components of the stack. These folks are targeting much smaller hardware than FreedomBox (Netgear wifi routers with >8MB of flash memory), but they are actively making a plug-and-play-rather-than-administer router that includes the basics of what FBX wants, like mesh routing, ipv6, dnssec. We can learn from them. Their main research goal is to reduce "bufferbloat", which is the tendency of network hardware and software (in the modern days of cheap RAM) to queue packets rather than dropping them. This confuses classic TCP, which depends on packet loss to signal congestion. When TCP never hears back about congestion, it starts filling up the buffers somewhere deep in the net, which seriously sideswipes the latency experienced by all competing traffic. Even one massive TCP connection, in the presence of bufferbloat, can make dozens of other nearby TCP connections take SECONDS to get through. Unfortunately, bufferbloat is everywhere in modern network hardware and software, so removing it is a long-term project. The CeroWRT folks are part of the vanguard of fixing it. John _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list Freedombox-discuss@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE