v1.5-beta-3

LibreQoS V1.5-BETA-3

Download: https://libreqos.io/#download

Changelog Since 1.5-beta-2

• Fix “unknown” flags in the UI.
• Fix “download/download” on the tree.
• Fix “break system packages” flag on Debian installer, removing the “Python requirements.txt not installed” problems on older versions of Ubuntu.
• Fix a typo that prevent Spylnx integrations from working automatically in the scheduler.
• The title of your shaper node appears properly in your browser title bar now.
• The webserver no longer freezes.
• “Generated Site” no longer fills up the Sankeys.
• The main tree Sankey uses a ring buffer to smooth rendering (this is coming to other elements in the next beta).
• Nicer Sankey ribbon colors, especially in dark mode.
• Improved margins around several graphs to make the axis labels visible.
• The tick thread is now very careful to never overrun its desired time period; time-based spikes on usage (which spread to Long-Term Stats) are a thing of the past.
• You can add disable_webserver = false to your /etc/lqos.conf if you don’t want to have a web GUI at all.
• Filtered out “one way” flows from the ASN explorer (these are usually bot scans, and will be tracked separately in the next beta).
• Internal code:
  • Fix MANY warnings.
  • MANY diagnostic messages moved to “debug” level so they aren’t visible by default.
  • Transition from “log” to “tracing” for log handling. Improves performance, and is the new de-facto standard in Rust.
  • Reduced dependency on DashMap.
  • Replace channels with Crossbeam for greater performance and improved efficiency.
  • All threads are now named, you can watch them individually in htop!
  • Updated several dependency versions.
• Memory usage:
  • eBPF now has periodic garbage collection checks, expiring ancient history from the hosts list.
  • Configuration management is now much more memory-efficient.
  • Queue structure is stored more efficiently.
  • Shaped devices is stored more efficiently.
  • Switch to the mimalloc allocator for reduced total memory usage.
  • Flow tracking is significantly more efficient.
  • All channels are now bounded.
  • The webserver is now contained to a single thread.
  • Network.json handling is significantly more efficient.
  • MANY hot-loop allocations have been moved out of the hot loop and into a pre-made buffer.
  • Reduced size of preallocated buffers; it can grow if needed.

Download: https://libreqos.io/#download

Changelog Since 1.5-beta-1

New User Interface (UI2)

• UI2 is a complete overhaul of the LibreQoS Web UI - featuring a customizable dasboard with widgets displaying various network performance metric including TCP RTT and TCP Retransmits.
• Quick LibreQoS v1.5-BETA-2 deep dive with Herbert Wolverson

Changelog Since 1.4

LibreQoS v1.5 Features Overview:

• 30%+ Performance Improvement. Large improvements in code efficiency. LibreQoS can now push 70 Gbit/s on a $1500 AMD Ryzen 9 7950X box with a Mellanox MCX516A card.
• Intelligent Binpacking. Dynamically redistribute load (based on long-term statistics) to get the most out of all of your CPU cores.
• Flow-Based Analysis. Flows are tracked individually, for TCP retransmits, round-trip time, and performance. Completed flows can be analyzed by ASN, geolocated, or exported via Netflow.
• Unified Configuration System and GUI. No more separate ispConfig.py and lqos.conf files - all configuration is managed in one place. The web user interface now lets you manage the whole configuration, including devices and network lists.
• Support for Newer Linux Enhancements. LibreQoS can take advantage of eBPF improvements in the 6.x kernel tree to further improve your performance - but remains compatible with later 5.x kernels.
• Improved CLI tools. lqtop, a new support tool and more.

Unified Configuration System

• Replace ispConfig.py with a singular /etc/lqos.conf
• Automatically migrate previous configuration
• In-memory cache system (load the config once and share it, detect changes)
• Shared configuration between Python and Rust

Dynamic Binpacking

• It was a common problem for the CPU-queue assignment (in tree mode) to allocate too many resources
  to a single CPU.
• Each circuit is assigned a "weight". If you have Long-Term Stats, then the weight is calculated based on
  past usage AND assigned speed plan. Without LTS, it's just assigned speed plan.
• The total weight - at this time of day - is then calculated for each top-level entry.
• A "binpacking" algorithm then attempts to equalize load between CPUs.
• Significant performance improvement on many networks.

Per-Flow Tracking System

• "Flows" are detected as TCP connections, UDP connections that reuse a source/destination and ICMP between a source/destination.
• Rather than just track per-host statistics, statistics are attached to a flow.
• Flows maintain a rate estimation at all times, in-kernel.
• Flows calculate Round-Trip Time (RTT) continuously.
• Flows spot timestamp duplications indicating TCP Retry (or duplicate).
• Much of the kernel code moved from the TC part of eBPF to the XDP part, giving a modest speed-up and improvement in
  overall throughput.

Per-Flow Userland/Kernel Kernel-Userland System

• Rather than reporting RTT via a giant data structure, individual reports are fed to the kernel through a userspace callback
  system.
• Flows "closing" (clean closure) results in a kernel-userspace notify.
• Flows also expire on a periodic tick if no data has arrived in a given time period.
• This decreased kernel side overhead significantly (eBPF kernel to userspace is non-blocking send).
• This increased userspace CPU usage very slightly, but removed the processing overhead from the packet-flow execution path.

Per-Flow Reporting System

• RTT is compiled per-flow into a ringbuffer. Results from very-low (mostly idle) flows are ignored. RTT is calculated from a median of the last
  hundred reports. Significant accuracy improvement.
• Per-flow TCP retries are recorded.
• When flows "close", they are submitted for additional analysis.
• Simple protocol naming system maps ethertype/port to known protocols.

Export Flow Data in netflow version 5 and 9 (IPFIX)

Closed Flow Reporting System

• Created "geo.bin", a compiled list of by-ASN and by IP geolocations.
• lqosd will download a refreshed geo.bin periodically.
• Closed flows are mapped to an ASN, giving per-ASN performance reports.
• Closed flows are mapped to a geolocation, giving geographic performance reports.
• Closed flows are mapped to ethertype and protocol.
• User interface expanded in lqos_node_manager to display all of this.

Preflight checks for lqosd

• Prior to startup, common configuration and hardware support issues are checked.
• Single-queue NICs now get a proper error message.
• If the user tries to run both a Linux bridge and an XDP bridge on the same interface pair,
  the XDP bridge is disabled and a warning emitted.

XDP "Hot Cache"

• Much CPU time was spent running a longest-prefix match check on every ISP-facing IP address.
• Added a least-recently-used cache that matches IP adddresses to circuits with a much less
  expensive fast lookup.
• Added a "negative cache" entry to speed up "this IP still isn't mapped"
• Added cache invalidation code to handle the IP mappings changing
• This resulted in a 20-30% CPU usage reduction under heavy load.

Config UI

• lqos_node_manager is now aware of the entire configuration system.
• All configuration items may be edited.
• ShapedDevices.csv can be edited from the web UI.
• network.json can be edited from the web UI.
• Heavy validation, ensuring that devices have matching network.json entries, IPs aren't duplicated, etc.

LQTop

• New lqtop CLI tool with much prettier text UI and support for flows.

UISP Integration 2

• An all-new, massively faster UISP Integration system.
• Includes much better network map traversal.

Support Tools

• CLI tool for running a "sanity check" on common issues.
• Gather configuration into a bundle for sending.
• View the bundle.
• Submit the bundle to LibreQoS for analysis.
• A web UI (lqos_node_manager) version of the same thing, using shared code.

Misc

• Improvements and fixes to all integrations, especially Spylnx.
• Update back-end code to latest versions.