nice stuff from cloudflare (and, we need something like ethtool!)

[Ian Smith]

On Thu, 15 Oct 2015 17:03:55 +0800, Julian Elischer wrote:
 > On 10/10/15 10:59 PM, Luigi Rizzo wrote:
 > > the nice folks at cloudflare implemented a nice feature
 > > in netmap that puts some queues of the NIC in netmap mode
 > > leaving others attached to the host stack
 > > 
 > > https://blog.cloudflare.com/single-rx-queue-kernel-bypass-with-netmap/
 > > 
 > > and use ethtool (and native NIC filters) to steer traffic around.
 > > [FWIW, the chelsio native netmap driver is similar except that
 > > the netmap queue has a different MAC address]
 > > 
 > > While their code was developed on linux, it should run
 > > almost unmodified on FreeBSD (and we plan to import it soon),
 > > except for the fact that we don't have ethtool hence no
 > > device-independent mechanism to configure traffic steering.
 > > 
 > > We really need to address the latter.
 > 
 > I suspect the answer may be a device dependent sysctl

Interesting; care to flesh out your ideas a bit on how that might work?

I've done nothing more than skim ethtool(8) on linuxcommand.org, and
wondered why its functionality wasn't incorporated into ifconfig, but 
then ifconfig (on FreeBSD anyway) is tending towards obesity already ..

cheers, Ian