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tl;dr SQM is needed in most bottleneck routers as endpoints cannot be relied upon to know or respect resource constraints.

yes and no. "throttling up the stack" is crude but effective in a narrow set of circumstances (just takes an additional transfer from another device to render it ineffective).

ack thinning (dropping ack segments) is supported in cake but it's not a mechanism of throttling but for very asymmetric lines such as docsis where surplus ack's can saturate the upstream.

dropping of regular packets is the only way to reliably communicate "slow down" between tcp-endpoints (yes ecn exists) but this is not the main selling point here. every queue has to drop packets at some point, codel does it in a smart way.

fair queueing dissects diverse packet streams into flows (same set of src/dst ip/port) and separates them in order to minimize interference. this is what you want basically everywhere as ip-networks are by definition "best effort" and no amount of userspace whishmakeing (dscp,l4s) is going to fix it.




thank you gerald for getting this all exactly right.




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