FreeBSD as a gigabit router

[Pyun YongHyeon]

On Wed, Oct 03, 2007 at 11:21:23PM +0300, Cristian KLEIN wrote:
 > Hi list,
 > 
 > A few days ago I tested whether a FreeBSD 7 box is able to handle Gigabit
 > traffic. So I used a Cisco 7600 and added static routes from the router to the
 > box and from the box to the router, so that some packets would loop between the
 > two. Then I externally injected 30Mbps of "ping -f -t 255 -s <size>", which
 > should have generated a "maximum" of 3,6Gbps. I then used nload on the box to
 > graph the bandwidth.
 > 
 > The box is a Intel Core 2 Duo, with a PCIe re NIC. I used FreeBSD i386 with
 > polling and fastforwarding. No WITNESS, INVARIANTS or firewalls.
 > 

Though RealTek GigE is not best suitable hardware for gigabit traffic 
handling how about overhauled re(4)? I've tried hard to fine tune
the driver and it may have performance improvements over stock re(4).
http://people.freebsd.org/~yongari/re/re.HEAD.patch

 > I was amased to see that injecting 1000 bytes packets gave a maximum throughput
 > of 650Mbps, while 1400 bytes gave 750Mbps. During both tests one core was 98%
 > idle, while the other one was more than 80% idle.
 > 
 > Can anybody point me what the bottleneck of this configuration is? CPU was
 > mostly idle and PCIe 1x should carry way more. Or is the experiment perhaps
 > fundamentally flawed?
 > 
 > Thanks.
 > 

-- 
Regards,
Pyun YongHyeon