Freebsd IP Forwarding performance (question, and some info) [7-stable, current, em, smp]

[Brian McGinty]

G'day Kip,

> I'm hoping to get to it some time in August. I'm a bit behind in my
> contracts at the moment.

A few weeks ago, I did a quick comparison of the driver between
FreeBSD and Linux, and found quite a few differences that's worth
pulling over.  The guy from Intel working on FreeBSD, Jack?, is he the
one that does this sort of sync-up of the drivers between the two
distribution, or you?  There's been a lot of changes recently,
including full support for multiple Rx/Tx queues that significantly
ups the ante on performance. FreeBSD doesn't support multiple Rx/Tx,
or does something half arsed.

> FYI: I'm actually able to forward 2.3Mpps between 2 10Gig interfaces
> on an 8-core system. I'm hoping to push it up to 3Mpps.

Is this no-loss number, and how did you test it?  I don't have
throughput numbers for the Oplin.  I'm waiting to get some time on the
Ixia at work to generate performance numbers for 1G and 10G for all
packet sizes, on FreeBSD and Linux, on a 16 core system, and blast it
to the list. I expect Linux to do 2-3 times better :-)

Later,
Brian