Vector Packet Processing (VPP) portability on FreeBSD

[Francois ten Krooden]

On Thursday, 13 May 2021 13:05 Luigi Rizzo wrote:
>
> On Thu, May 13, 2021 at 10:42 AM Francois ten Krooden
> <ftk at nanoteq.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi
> >
> > Just for info I ran a test using TREX (https://trex-tgn.cisco.com/)
> > Where I just sent traffic in one direction through the box running  FreeBSD
> with VPP using the netmap interfaces.
> > These were the results we found before significant packet loss started
> occuring.
> > +-------------+------------------+
> > | Packet Size | Throughput (pps) |
> > +-------------+------------------+
> > |   64 bytes  |   1.008 Mpps     |
> > |  128 bytes  |   920.311 kpps   |
> > |  256 bytes  |   797.789 kpps   |
> > |  512 bytes  |   706.338 kpps   |
> > | 1024 bytes  |   621.963 kpps   |
> > | 1280 bytes  |   569.140 kpps   |
> > | 1440 bytes  |   547.139 kpps   |
> > | 1518 bytes  |   524.864 kpps   |
> > +-------------+------------------+
>
> Those numbers are way too low for netmap.
>
> I believe you are either using the emulated mode, or issuing a system call on
> every single packet.
>
> I am not up to date (Vincenzo may know better) but there used to be a sysctl
> variable to control the operating mode:
>
> https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=netmap&sektion=4
>
> SYSCTL VARIABLES AND MODULE PARAMETERS
>      Some aspects of the operation of netmap and VALE are controlled
> through
>      sysctl variables on FreeBSD (dev.netmap.*) and module parameters on
> Linux
>      (/sys/module/netmap/parameters/*):
>
>      dev.netmap.admode: 0
>      Controls the use of native or emulated adapter mode.
>
>      0 uses the best available option;
>
>      1 forces native mode and fails if not available;
>
>      2 forces emulated hence never fails.
>
> If it still exists, try set it to 1. If the program fails, then you should figure out
> why native netmap support is not compiled in.

Thank you.  I did set this to 1 specifically now and it still works.  So then it should be running in native mode.

I will dig a bit into the function that processes the incoming packets.
The code I currently use was added to VPP in somewhere before 2016, so it might be that there is a bug in that code.

Will try and see if I can find anything interesting there.

>
> cheers
> luigi
>



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