Alternative to pf?

[Jim Thompson]

> On Dec 17, 2014, at 6:16 PM, Christopher Petrik <chris at bsdjunk.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Dec 18, 2014 at 12:43:59AM +0100, Daniel Engberg wrote:
>> 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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> Hi,
> I think the real question is, "Do we really need so many firewall suites
> in FreeBSD" we have ipfw, ipf, pf I think the solution would be to port
> npf as it's bases is to be portable. I use it and it takes some getting
> used to but it looks promising. But then this creates a 4th suite to add
> into FreeBSD ?

We could ‘port’ it to run on top of netmap (like the version of ipfw that runs over netmap).

Then it’s not necessarily “in” FreeBSD.



Jim