PF bugs

[Peter N. M. Hansteen]

Gleb Smirnoff <glebius at FreeBSD.org> writes:

>   The number of people who run both OpenBSD and FreeBSD is signficantly
> less then number of people who just run FreeBSD and routinely upgrade
> it from version to version. I understand that having different syntax
> is a PITA for those who run both BSDs, sorry for that. But changing
> syntax in FreeBSD would be PITA for a vast majority of people. That's
> why many FreeBSD developers are against changing syntax.

Breaking people's configs are generally undesirable, but in this case
along with the nat and rdr syntax change comes goodies like match,
settable state defaults, divert-to, pflow, and various
performance-relevant code improvements.

On the OpenBSD side, the added features and performance improvements
were considered worth the temporary pain of changing NAT and
redirection rules (but really, in almost all cases the conversion is
trivial, and the really weird setups turn out far more maintainable
with the new syntax than the old). 
>
> P> Also, the new queueing subsystem that's now likely to be in OpenBSD
> P> 5.5 (to be released May 1st 2014) is likely to be a major feature that
> P> I think FreeBSD will want to include as soon as doable.
>
>   While OpenBSD changes struct ifqueue if_snd in the ifnet to
> if_snd[nqueues], FreeBSD moves in the direction of killing the queue.
> The queue has showed itself as the major bottleneck for high speed
> interfaces, and now in FreeBSD all gigabit and 10gig NIC drivers
> bypass the ifqueue, it is left only for compatibility. That's why
> we don't plan to move back to queues.
>
>>From my viewpoint the best send scheduling method in the modern world
> is utilize multiqueueing that NICs provide. Most high end NICs now do.
> We just need some hardware abstraction layer upon that.
>
> Right now Andre Oppermann is planning a major work on the TX side of
> NIC drivers, and I'm pretty sure, he will consider traffic prioritisation.

prio (pure priority) specifiable per rule is available by default
since OpenBSD 5.0, the first part of a longer term plan to replace
ALTQ with traffic shaping that fits better with the more modern code
surrounding it (and that's where the array of queues comes from, to
implement the always-on priority scheme). 

Not sure at first blush how much of a conflict there will be between
the traffic shaping code that is likely to hit the OpenBSD tree in
time for 5.5 (due to be released May 1st 2014), but it would bear
looking into I suppose. The diff at http://bulabula.org/diffs/newqueue.diff 
applied to a recent OpenBSD-current is what is being tested at the moment.

- Peter

-- 
Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team
http://bsdly.blogspot.com/ http://www.bsdly.net/ http://www.nuug.no/
"Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic"
delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds.