A clear explanation of modern Linux router architecture — how DSA, bridges, QoS, Wi-Fi and hardware offload actually fit together.
Why SQM Doesn’t Scale (And Why Datacenters Don’t Use It) SQM (Smart Queue Management) is one of the best things that happened to home networking. Enable CAKE or fq_codel, and suddenly: latency drops bufferbloat disappears the network feels “fast” again…
Why Flow Offload Breaks QoS (And When It’s Still Worth It) You enable QoS. You tune your queues. You finally get latency under control. Then you enable flow offload. And suddenly… everything feels wrong again. This is not a bug.…
Aligning QoS End-to-End: NIC, DSA, Switch and Wi-Fi QoS doesn’t fail because it’s hard. It fails because every layer interprets it differently. Switches, NICs, and Wi-Fi all have their own models. If they don’t align, QoS becomes unpredictable. The 4-Class…
Fixing Head-of-Line Blocking: Why Topology Matters More Than Queues In the previous article, we showed how the CPU port becomes the bottleneck in a DSA-based system. The obvious fix is “add more queues”. But that’s not enough. Because the real…
Why DSA exposes the CPU port as the real bottleneck — and how a topology-aware multi-queue NIC design fixes head-of-line blocking.
Why DSCP, switch QoS and Wi-Fi WMM don’t align — and how to build a consistent QoS model that actually works.
Why Wi-Fi bridging behaves differently from Ethernet switching — and how technologies like MediaTek WED are changing the datapath.
Why the classic “switch vs bridge” explanation breaks down in Linux — and how DSA merges both into a single model.
What the Linux bridge really is, why it is not a switch, and how DSA turns it into a powerful hardware-offloaded networking model.