Determine the latency to a SixXS Point of Presence

I've recently moved from NL to the UK and was looking at my SixXS IPv6 link. I wanted to make sure I'm getting the best connection possible, so went about checking the latency between my endpoint and the PoPs.

First - I did a simple mtr to my existing PoP in NL, then to the only UK based PoP. This initial test showed the latency to my existing endpoint was around 23ms, while it was around 30ms to the local UK based PoP. This doesn't seem right, so dig further.

mtr --psize=1496 nl-endpoint.sixxs.net

mtr uses ICMP echo requests to determine latency. By default these are 56 bytes, which is an unrealistic packet size for determining latency practical between two points. Once the packet size was set to something more reasonable, such as --psize=1496, then I saw less latency to the UK PoP.

mtr --psize=1496 uk-endpoint.sixxs.net

Aside from using mtr, there is another way to get a broader idea of latency between your endpoint and the available PoPs. The PoPs page at SixXS has a list of all currently active pops. Using this, here's a one-liner to fping all of them and quickly determine your best link:

wget -q --no-check-certificate -O - https://www.sixxs.net/pops/ | grep -Eo '[a-z]{5}[0-9]{2}' | grep -v xhtml | sort -u | while read PoP; do echo -n "$PoP.sixxs.net "; done | xargs fping -i 100 -p 50 -b 1208 -c 50 -n -s -a

LIRC in the 2.6.36 linux kernel

I've just upgraded to the 2.6.36 kernel and have found that lirc stopped working. lircd would load with the lirc-0.8.6 lirc_dev and lirc_sir modules in my kernel, but when irexec starts I'd get the following type of kernel oops.

BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 0000005c
IP: [] lirc_get_pdata+0x2e9/0x841 [lirc_dev]
*pde = 00000000 
Oops: 0000 [#6] 
last sysfs file: /sys/devices/virtual/block/md3/dev
Modules linked in: lirc_sir lirc_dev cls_route cls_u32 cls_fw sch_sfq sch_htb ipt_addrtype xt_DSCP xt_dscp xt_NFQUEUE xt_iprange xt_hashlimit xt_connmark nf_conntrack_sip w83697hf_wdt [last unloaded: lirc_dev]

Pid: 22422, comm: lircd Tainted: G      D     2.6.36.2_01 #3 CN700-8237R/ 
EIP: 0060:[] EFLAGS: 00010246 CPU: 0
EIP is at lirc_get_pdata+0x2e9/0x841 [lirc_dev]
EAX: f63fdec0 EBX: 80046900 ECX: 08062348 EDX: 80046900
ESI: f63fdec0 EDI: 00000000 EBP: 00000007 ESP: dc67bf14
 DS: 007b ES: 007b FS: 0000 GS: 0033 SS: 0068
Process lircd (pid: 22422, ti=dc67a000 task=f3dddc00 task.ti=dc67a000)
Stack:
 08062348 f63fdec0 fd6f82bd 00000007 00000007 c1079b76 c1deb3a0 f576a7ac
<0> b78287c0 00000004 00000028 c105d5f3 f5d17b78 000000c7 00000000 00000000
<0> 00000000 f5dbd900 b78287c0 f5d17b78 000000a0 00000246 f63fdec0 00000020
Call Trace:
 [] ? lirc_get_pdata+0x2bd/0x841 [lirc_dev]
 [] ? do_vfs_ioctl+0x456/0x4a1
 [] ? handle_mm_fault+0x2e0/0x672
 [] ? sys_ioctl+0x44/0x64
 [] ? sysenter_do_call+0x12/0x26
Code: 57 56 89 c6 53 89 d3 83 ec 04 83 3d 78 98 6f fd 00 89 0c 24 8b 78 68 74 12 52 ff 77 28 57 68 37 8f 6f fd e8 5a 0d ce c3 83 c4 10 <8b> 47 5c 85 c0 74 1d 8b 68 20 85 ed 74 16 8b 0c 24 89 f0 89 da 
EIP: [] lirc_get_pdata+0x2e9/0x841 [lirc_dev] SS:ESP 0068:dc67bf14
CR2: 000000000000005c
---[ end trace 1bec319525f4926b ]---

In my digging I found that parts of lirc are now in the linux kernel as of 2.6.36. But it's not obvious how to make use of this yet.

First - the lirc_dev module is selected from the "Drivers > Staging" section. But it won't appear there until you enable "Drivers > Multimedia > Infrared remove control adapters". This is where the IR_CORE is selected.

Next - lirc-0.9 is going to be needed to make proper use of these in-kernel modules. As of writing this lirc-0.9 is still pre-release, so I have taken the shortest path to get a working remote.

On my gentoo system, after building my new kernel and installing it I used to emerge lirc again to make sure the modules are in place. This is no longer necessary since the modules I need are fully in kernel. I've found that simply replacing the lirc built modules with the in-kernel ones, and continuing to use lirc-0.8.7 appears to work now. The lirc modules loaded are lirc_dev and lirc_sir.

See the new maintainers blog post about this at http://wilsonet.com/?p=85