Alternative to pf?
Daniel Engberg
daniel.engberg.lists at pyret.net
Thu Dec 18 00:02:47 UTC 2014
Hi,
During the year there has been several discussions regarding the state
of pf in FreeBSD. In most cases it seems to boil down to that it's too
hard/time-consuming to bring upstream patches from OpenBSD to FreeBSD.
As it's been mentioned Apple seems to update pf somewhat (copyright is
changed to 2013 at least) and file size differs between OS X releases
but I wasn't able to find any commit logs.
That said, NetBSD have something similar to pf in syntax called npf
which seems actively maintained and the author seems open to the idea of
porting it to FreeBSD.
http://www.netbsd.org/~rmind/pub/npf_asiabsdcon_2014.pdf - Page 24
However I'm not certain that it surpasses our current pf in terms of
functionality in all cases (apart from the firewalling ALTQ comes to
mind etc).
Perhaps this might be worth looking into and in the end drop pf due to
the reasons above?
That said, don't forget all the work that has gone into getting pf where
it is today.
While I'm at it, does anyone else than me use ALTQ? While it's not
multithreaded I find a very good "tool" and it does shaping really well.
Best regards,
Daniel
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