FreeBSD as a gigabit router

[Julian Elischer]

Artyom Viklenko wrote:
> Cristian KLEIN wrote:
>> Thank you all for your replies.
>>
>> Kirill Ponazdyr wrote:
>>>> Hi list,
>>>>
>>>> A few days ago I tested whether a FreeBSD 7 box is able to handle 
>>>> Gigabit
>>>> 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?
>>> ICMP is not a good way to perform such tests as many have mentioned,
>>> better use iperf.
>>
>> I used this test, because it proved perfect when, almost a decade ago, 
>> gigabit
>> appeared. There wasn't anything at that time that could fill 1 Gbps, 
>> so we used
>> the routers themselves to do the job. Also, I used this setup to avoid 
>> TCPs
>> congestion control mecachnism and sub-maximum bandwidth.
>>
>> Of course, when I said "ping -f", I didn't mean a single "ping -f", 
>> but rather
>> enough ping -f so that the looping packets would saturate the link.
> 
> You can use option -i instead of -f:
> 
> ping -nqs 1472 -i 0.00001 1.2.3.4
> 
> will generate large enougth amount of 1500 bytes packets.
> Even more, use size more than 1472 and number of packets
> will be increased. Value of -i parameter can be increased too.
> 
> But remember about sysctl variable net.inet.ip.maxfragsperpacket.
> By default, in FreeBSD 6.x it's value is 16.
> 
>>
>>> We have a FreeBSD 6.2 / pf box handling 2Gbps of traffic, real 
>>> traffic, it
>>> will probably handle more, we just had no capacities or need to test.
>>>
>>> Hardware is a Single 2.4 Ghz Xeon with 2 x Intel Quad Pro 1000MT PCI-X
>>> Controllers on separate PCI-X Busses.
>>
>> Could you tell me, is there any difference between 1000PT and 1000MT, 
>> except the
>> slot type? Also, is there any difference between Intel Desktop and 
>> Intel Server
>> adaptors, or are these just marketing buzzwords?
>>
>>
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> 

> 
 you can use the netgraph source node that is an in-kernel packet source.