Contributed by pitrh on 2014-04-19 from the Shapin' up good, Puffy! dept.

In between all the OpenSSL sound and fury it could have been easy to miss, but one of the likely Big News candidates for OpenBSD 5.6 just happened: Removal of the ALTQ traffic shaping system.

The commit message by Henning Brauer ( henning@ ) reads:

CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: henning@cvs.openbsd.org 2014/04/19 04:07:44 Modified files: sys/conf : GENERIC Log message: -option ALTQ

ALTQ has served us well for years and was extremely important not just for us, but for the entire bandwidth management arena. Back when we got altq, the subject was not yet well researched and understood, which is why altq is the framework with pluggable schedulers it is. Kenjiro Cho (kjc@) did an amazing job there. Now, more than 10 years later, we do have a good understanding and can use a simpler framework with just one priority queueing and one bandwidth shaping mechanism each - the new queueing subsystem. Last not least because it is incredibly painful to maintain both in parallel, it is time for altq to depart. Farewell, thanks for many years of good service. Everybody using any form of "not just fifo" queueing owes Kenjiro a lot. At least buy him a beer when you meet him. And, allow me this personal note, thanks Kenjiro, working with you on the topic has always been a great pleasure and I learned a lot from you. Thanks!

A few more commits followed soon after, removing the final ALTQ references in other source files and the man pages.

The removal of ALTQ was expected. After the introduction of the new priorities and queues traffic shaping system in OpenBSD 5.5, the old system was set to be retired after a transitional period. Now we know that the transitional period was one release only. In OpenBSD 5.5 you will still have the choice to keep your ALTQ configuration with minimal changes, but when you upgrade to OpenBSD 5.6 or later, you will have to make the switch, if you haven't already while running OpenBSD 5.5.

(And by the way, the editors support Henning's suggestion that you buy developers beer fully)