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

       ingress
              Indicates that CAKE is running in ingress mode (i.e.
              running on the downlink of a connection). This changes the
              shaper to also count dropped packets as data transferred,
              as these will have already traversed the link before CAKE
              can choose what to do with them.

              In addition, the AQM will be tuned to always keep at least
              two packets queued per flow. The reason for this is that
              retransmits are more expensive in ingress mode, since
              dropped packets have to traverse the link again; thus,
              keeping a minimum number of packets queued will improve
              throughput in cases where the number of active flows are so
              large that they saturate the link even at their minimum
              window size.

       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
       <netdev@vger.kernel.org>.

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
       netdev@vger.kernel.org, shemminger@osdl.org.  This page was
       obtained from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/network/iproute2/iproute2.git⟩ on
       2025-02-02.  (At that time, the date of the most recent commit
       that was found in the repository was 2025-01-21.)  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 man-pages@man7.org

iproute2                       19 July 2018                       CAKE(8)

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