11. Annotated Traffic Control Links

This section identifies a number of links to documentation about traffic control and Linux traffic control software. Each link will be listed with a brief description of the content at that site.

• HTB site, HTB user guide and HTB theory (Martin "devik" Devera)

  Hierarchical Token Bucket, HTB, is a classful queuing discipline. Widely used and supported it is also fairly well documented in the user guide and at Stef Coene's site (see below).

• General Quality of Service docs (Leonardo Balliache)

  There is a good deal of understandable and introductory documentation on his site, and in particular has some excellent overview material. See in particular, the detailed Linux QoS document among others.

• tcng (Traffic Control Next Generation) and tcng manual (Werner Almesberger)

  The tcng software includes a language and a set of tools for creating and testing traffic control structures. In addition to generating tc commands as output, it is also capable of providing output for non-Linux applications. A key piece of the tcng suite which is ignored in this documentation is the tcsim traffic control simulator.

  The user manual provided with the tcng software has been converted to HTML with latex2html. The distribution comes with the TeX documentation.

• iproute2 and iproute2 manual (Alexey Kuznetsov)

  This is a the source code for the iproute2 suite, which includes the essential tc binary. Note, that as of iproute2-2.4.7-now-ss020116-try.tar.gz, the package did not support HTB, so a patch available from the HTB site will be required.

  The manual documents the entire suite of tools, although the tc utility is not adequately documented here. The ambitious reader is recommended to the LARTC HOWTO after consuming this introduction.

• Documentation, graphs, scripts and guidelines to traffic control under Linux (Stef Coene)

  Stef Coene has been gathering statistics and test results, scripts and tips for the use of QoS under Linux. There are some particularly useful graphs and guidelines available for implementing traffic control at Stef's site.

• LARTC HOWTO (bert hubert, et. al.)

  The Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic Control HOWTO is one of the key sources of data about the sophisticated techniques which are available for use under Linux. The Traffic Control Introduction HOWTO should provide the reader with enough background in the language and concepts of traffic control. The LARTC HOWTO is the next place the reader should look for general traffic control information.

• Guide to IP Networking with Linux (Martin A. Brown)

  Not directly related to traffic control, this site includes articles and general documentation on the behaviour of the Linux IP layer.

• Werner Almesberger's Papers

  Werner Almesberger is one of the main developers and champions of traffic control under Linux (he's also the author of tcng, above). One of the key documents describing the entire traffic control architecture of the Linux kernel is his Linux Traffic Control - Implementation Overview which is available in PDF or PS format.

• Linux DiffServ project

  Mercilessly snipped from the main page of the DiffServ site...

  Differentiated Services (short: Diffserv) is an architecture for providing different types or levels of service for network traffic. One key characteristic of Diffserv is that flows are aggregated in the network, so that core routers only need to distinguish a comparably small number of aggregated flows, even if those flows contain thousands or millions of individual flows.