T X's Junkyard – distributed Translation Table¶

Problem¶

In larger mesh networks we are accumulating more and more TT entries, leading to a significant amount of memory usage for the common, cheap wifi routers with 32MB of RAM. The recent multicast optimization additions probably increases this by a factor of about 4-6.

Each global TT entry currently takes ~200 bytes (144B for struct, 56B for orig_list_entry). Maybe it's even more since they are allocated from kmalloc-node (objsize 192) and kmalloc-64 kmem-caches?

Freifunk Hamburg has about 3000 clients. @256B per TT entry this means 750KB. With the multicast factor, that's ~4MB. Which is quite a lot for 32MB devices.

Solution: ''Long-Term'' + ''Short-Term'' Memory?¶

DHT¶

Many global TT entries are never used by a node. We could use the current TT global entry layout for frequently used entries. And push unused entries to a distributed storage. We already have a DHT for DAT, we could generalize it?

USB-Storage¶

Instead of using a DHT, we could use local storage. The flash storage of these wifi routers is usually even smaller than the RAM. However, a few GB large USB sticks are cheap+tiny and many wifi routers come with a USB port these days. Storing databases on such USB devices is fast and has no packet loss compared to remote storage. batman-adv could search for mounted devices with a magic folder "wayne-enterprises" in their root directory.

(for the few devices without USB, we could come up with an "Ethernet-to-USB" converter, utilizing the USB-over-IP feature of the Linux kernel? Would need the OS to discover and configure it, would be ugly to do all this from batman-adv... More headaches: What to do if storage fails or userspace messes with it? Maybe use raw devices instead, ones which are marked as wayne-fs in the partition table?)