state of packet forwarding in FreeBSD?

[Olivier Cochard-Labbé]

On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 4:48 PM, John Jasen <jjasen at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> b) On the negative side, between the various releases, netmap appeared
> to be unstable with the Chelsio cards -- sometimes supported, sometimes
> broken. Also, we're still trying to figure out netmap utilities, such as
> vale-ctl and bridge, so any advice would be appreciated.
>

I confirm that mixing netmap and Chelsio is broken on -current since about​

​6 month.
We can't start 2 netmap's pkt-gen simultaneously as example.

cf my report:
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/svn-src-head/2016-December/094418.html

​

>
> b.1) netmap-fwd is admittedly single-threaded and does not support IPv6.
> These clearly showed in our tests, as we were unable to achieve over 2.5
> mpps, saturating a single CPU and letting the others fall asleep.
> However, bumping a single CPU queue from around 0.6 mpps to 2.5 mpps is
> nothing to ignore, so it could be useful in some cases.
>

​Softwares using netmap are not easy to use:
- netmap-ipfw (https://github.com/Netgate/netmap-fwd) was not updated since
dec 2015.
- And I don't reach to compile netmap-ipfw too (
https://github.com/luigirizzo/netmap-ipfw).

​


> c) The routing improvement project USB stick performed incredibly,
> achieving 8.5 mpps out of the box. However, it appears
> (https://wiki.freebsd.org/ProjectsRoutingProposal/ConversionStatus),
> that many of the changes are still pending review, and that things have
> not moved much in the last 18 months
> (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/projects/routing/)
>
​
Yes, this projects/routing still give the best performance after 18 months,
but the maintainer didn't have time to works on FreeBSD since.

Then for resuming: there are 3 alpha-stage but very promising projects, but
they seems stuck because not enough manpower for finishing them.

Regards,