Dave Täht has died - Hacker News

Posted by mhandley 4/1/2025

245 points | 53 commentspage 2

i_am_a_peasant 4/2/2025|

Dave Täht was my initial motivation to get serious about getting into low level networking more than 8 years ago. Ever since then I’ve had the honor to co-develop various systems on multi terabit ISP routers. I’m really thankful for the insights he provided as I was trying to figure out how to configure WRED hardware blocks in our network ASICs. Men like Dave was one in hundred million if that. May he be forever remembered and his work live on forever.

topranks 4/2/2025|

Sorry to hijack this but your role has me curious.

What - if any - are the barriers to implementing FQ-Codel or a similar scheme in forwarding ASICs? To my mind with limited knowledge managing all those separate queues sounds like it could be challenging in hardware.

i_am_a_peasant 4/5/2025||

woulda been cool to see, in general core ISP routers care more about traffic classes than per flow fairness. fq codel is definitely the way to go on the consumer end though

toomuchtodo 4/1/2025||

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_T%C3%A4ht

https://blog.cerowrt.org/

https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/bloat/2025-April/018...

pabs3 4/2/2025|

Some more related links:

https://libreqos.io/ https://understandinglatency.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/dtaht https://www.patreon.com/dtaht https://www.facebook.com/dtaht/ https://www.youtube.com/@davetaht4989 https://twitter.net/mtaht https://github.com/dtaht http://www.taht.net/ http://www.taht.net/~d/ http://www.taht.net/~mtaht/ http://www.teklibre.net/ http://www.teklibre.net/~d/ http://www.teklibre.net/~mtaht/

inemesitaffia 4/2/2025||

There's a reddit account too

pabs3 4/2/2025||

https://www.reddit.com/user/dtaht/

schoen 4/1/2025||

Argh, he was the immediately previous person before me to work on the Unicast Extension Project and still a coauthor on all of our reserved address drafts!

Now our lowest-address draft is at 50% deceased coauthors.

avh02 4/2/2025||

Never realised that Dave had so much impact on the networking world until now - he had contacted me out of the blue on linkedin years ago after a blog post about my cable/DSL connection woes - wish I talked to him a little more about it. I can see what people mean about him being present everywhere.

Seeing his name on HN, especially in this context, threw me off a little. RIP Dave.

ggm 4/1/2025||

Hosted one of his measurement boxes for a while. Nice guy, very committed to researching the problem space.

raggi 4/1/2025||

Dave was ever-present in the areas he had passion for and that presence and unwavering advocacy had many positive outcomes. I'll miss his friendly challenges during future work in this space, they were always enjoyable and valuable even when we had differing approaches.

yusyusyus 4/1/2025||

met him in prague. had his guitar. played a song for me and this other dude hanging out in the smoking area.

have a video of it if there is a good place to send it to.

RIP to a real one.

consumer451 4/2/2025||

Looks like others are sharing things like that here:

https://github.com/LibreQoE/LibreQoS/pull/684

muppetman 4/1/2025|||

This would be as good a place as any to share it :)

daerogami 4/2/2025||

Youtube then link it everywhere. Here, the Reddit thread that links to here, etc.

ironcloudz 4/3/2025||

I worked with him in the 90's at SCO and we became friends based more upon music than tech.

He was an early adopter of a kludgy midi bass which he insisted I play but we had lots of laughs at how ridiculous it was.

He visited us in NM about ten years ago and voraciously consumed my wife's pumpkin waffles like he had not eaten for days. Which, knowing him, he likely had not.

I called him MTaht since that was his email handle at SCO.

Many other tales to tell but I will stop.

I am shocked at his passing too soon.

Happy travels, amigo!

pabs3 4/2/2025||

I wonder how many people will never be able to use his work because their router/other firmware is proprietary, GPL violating or otherwise non-upgradable.

BenjiWiebe 4/2/2025|

Very very many of the non-upgradable and proprietary routers use Linux under the hood. As long as they aren't stuck on an ancient Linux kernel, they would be able to use fq-codel and CAKE.

samuel_curry 4/3/2025|

I ran into him at a store in El Granada in 2022. He was wearing a USENIX t-shirt and I commented on it. I think he was living on a boat in the harbor at the time, it was a little sad. How did he pass?

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