OpenBSD Journal

ALTQ removed from -current

Contributed by pitrh on from the Shapin' up good, Puffy! dept.

In between all the OpenSSL sound and fury it could have been easy to miss, but one of the likely Big News candidates for OpenBSD 5.6 just happened: Removal of the ALTQ traffic shaping system.

The commit message by Henning Brauer (henning@) reads:

CVSROOT:	/cvs
Module name:	src
Changes by:	henning@cvs.openbsd.org	2014/04/19 04:07:44

Modified files:
	sys/conf       : GENERIC 

Log message:
-option ALTQ
ALTQ has served us well for years and was extremely important not just for
us, but for the entire bandwidth management arena. Back when we got altq,
the subject was not yet well researched and understood, which is why altq
is the framework with pluggable schedulers it is. Kenjiro Cho (kjc@) did an
amazing job there.

Now, more than 10 years later, we do have a good understanding and can use
a simpler framework with just one priority queueing and one bandwidth
shaping mechanism each - the new queueing subsystem. Last not least because
it is incredibly painful to maintain both in parallel, it is time for altq
to depart. Farewell, thanks for many years of good service. Everybody
using any form of "not just fifo" queueing owes Kenjiro a lot. At least
buy him a beer when you meet him.

And, allow me this personal note, thanks Kenjiro, working with you on the
topic has always been a great pleasure and I learned a lot from you. Thanks!

A few more commits followed soon after, removing the final ALTQ references in other source files and the man pages.

The removal of ALTQ was expected. After the introduction of the new priorities and queues traffic shaping system in OpenBSD 5.5, the old system was set to be retired after a transitional period. Now we know that the transitional period was one release only. In OpenBSD 5.5 you will still have the choice to keep your ALTQ configuration with minimal changes, but when you upgrade to OpenBSD 5.6 or later, you will have to make the switch, if you haven't already while running OpenBSD 5.5.

(And by the way, the editors support Henning's suggestion that you buy developers beer fully)

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (181.29.186.18) on

    It would be great to have a few configuration examples. The 'Packet Queueing and Prioritization' faq has altq enabled everywhere.

    Comments
    1. By Peter N. M. Hansteen (pitrh) on http://bsdly.blogspot.com/

      > It would be great to have a few configuration examples. The 'Packet Queueing and Prioritization' faq has altq enabled everywhere.

      You can reasonably expect the FAQ to be updated for the 5.5 release. And there will be updates to other resources as well.

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