FreeBSD boxes as a 'router'...

[John Fretby]

Howdy all,

We've currently got an ageing HP DL360 running as a 'router' - it has
100Mbit in/out onto our network, and has two 'bce' NIC's providing in/out.
It's running quite an old version of FreeBSD (6 I think) - but works.

As the network gets busier we've noticed the amount of interrupt time on it
is climbing (as you'd expect - i.e. esp. if many small packets are being
forwarded). Many moons ago we did experiment with this box - and enabled
device polling (inc. upping the HZ on the box and recompiling the kernel
etc). This didn't work very well at the time (probably because it was in
it's infancy) so we left it off in the end.

If we were to replace this box, with something new - say a SuperMicro based
system with two:

   Intel 82574L's (em Driver Based)

And enable polling - is it likely to "just work" these days? The current
upstream is 100Mbit, we're looking to upgrade this to 1Gbit in, but with
say 200Mbit comitted on it (so shouldn't go above 200Mbit).

Is there anything that has to be done to enable polling - other than
recompiling GENERIC to support it? - i.e. no HZ hacks or anything needed on
'modern' machines (it's a quad core Xeon).

Cheers,

Jon.