FreeBSD problems and preliminary ways to solve

[Robert Watson]

On Fri, 19 Aug 2011, Lev Serebryakov wrote:

>> 3. Kernel features for complex network solutions (netgraph, carp, ipfw).
>>    The niche for routers & traffic analysis is still ours. It would be
>>    nice to take e.g. pfSense and agree with some vendor (Netgear,
>>    D-Link, etc) to put on sale hardware with FreeBSD inside.
>
>  What about 10G routing? Here are reports about full-bandwidth 10G routing 
> on modern Intel NICs with Linux (and multi-core server), but I didn't see 
> any such data for FreeBSD, and somebody says, that Intel drivers and network 
> stack is not so good parallel in FreeBSD.

Our network stack is actually pretty parallel as such things go, and there are 
a number of changes in FreeBSD 9.x that extend this work.  Most of the 
performance work is being done on edge nodes rather than middle nodes -- i.e., 
maxing out multiple 10gbps links serving content, etc, rather than in routing 
configurations, though.  We also have a strong and growing collection of 
10gbps drivers.  You'll find our drivers lifted for many other systems, 
including Solaris :-).

There are a few known issues in terms of parallelism -- one is contention 
between the ithread and user thread on per-TCP connection locks.  Another is 
that we still haven't managed to switch to per-CPU statistics for the network 
stack (which is fairly straight forward in a specific sense, but we'd like a 
proper abstraction for it so we can generalise).

Robert