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

[Jim Thompson]

> On Oct 16, 2015, at 12:06 AM, Ian Smith <smithi at nimnet.asn.au> wrote:
> 
>> 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 

Luigi already did netlink sockets for FreeBSD. 

https://github.com/luigirizzo/netlink-freebsd

How difficult could it be to adapt ethtool to that?

Jim