pf error - "No ALTQ support in the kernel"... What does this mean?

Question

I am running Mac OS X. I would like to be able to configure pf because it seems to be more sophisticated and flexible than the default Mac OS X firewall that you can access through the System Preferences. I tried using some pf commands and got some errors that I don't understand.

bash-3.2$ sudo pfctl -s rules
No ALTQ support in kernel
ALTQ related functions disabled
scrub-anchor "com.apple/*" all fragment reassemble
anchor "com.apple/*" all
bash-3.2$ sudo pfctl -s states
No ALTQ support in kernel
ALTQ related functions disabled

I looked up ALTQ on Wikipedia and it seems to be a queueing program that does statistical multiplexing of packets at the kernel level. It is the kernel module that BSD systems use for queueing of packets. And the Mac OS X kernel apparently doesn't support it.

Okay, so this doesn't really make sense. Why would Mac OS X include the BSD pf firewall but not include support for the queueing software necessary to make that firewall work? Isn't that kind of counter-productive? There must be some way to turn support for ALTQ on, but I have no idea what it is. I'm not even entirely sure what ALTQ is. Is it a loadable kernel module that I have to load using the kextload command? Or is the problem that it's already there but the kernel is just incompatible with it. I am utterly confused.

Answer 1

You need to enable Firewall:
System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Firewall -> Turn On Firewall
(Under the hood it doing sudo pfctl -E)

if you would try after that : sudo pfctl -s info it shouldn't blame about ALTQ