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What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the shiny-new-features dept.

jjgm writes "As FreeBSD 5-STABLE approaches, Andre Oppermann has produced a high-level presentation on the changes to the FreeBSD 5.3 network stack. There are many clever tricks for performance and scalability. Amongst other things, Andre claims that FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

6 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. a.k.a. Project Evil by Goyuix · · Score: 4, Interesting

    NDIS Binary Compatibility

    FreeBSD i386 can use binary Ethernet and WLAN network drivers written to the
    Windows XP NDIS 5.1 specification. It is a little cumbersome to convert a NDIS driver
    into a FreeBSD Kernel Loadable Module (KLD): (By: wpaul)

    # ndiscvt -O -i neti557x.inf -s neti557x.sys -n intel0
    # /* Compile and install new kernel with "options NDIS" */
    # kldload intel0

    Man ndis(4), ndisapi(9), ndiscvt(

  2. Re:?pps by Homology · · Score: 4, Interesting
    It is usually high packets per second that brings a machine to its knees, as opposed to bits or bytes per second.

    Indeed, in this is very you will see a very marked difference between low and high quality network cards. For instance, the common Realtek NIC offloads alot onto the CPU, and induce many interrupts. While high quality cards, like Intel gigabit, will do much prosessing on the card itself. A "ping -f" while using top can be instructive.

  3. WIll this make it to Mac OS X? by AIXadmin · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The more interesting thing for me is: Will these enhancements make it to Mac OS X?

    As far as I am concerned, the closer Mac OS X under the hood, makes itself closer to FreeBSD the better.

  4. Re:Sounds great by torstenvl · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The BSD networking stack or some sort of clone thereof is in use on every modern operating system in the world. TCP/IP was originally made on BSD. Try opening ftp.exe on Windows in Notepad. Yep, there it is. Copyright Regents of the University of California. It's everywhere. Even the paradigm of sockets is everywhere. BSD defines networking.

    Also, features lead to bloat, the opposite of "high-performance" so your argument needs further detail to be of any credibility.

  5. We survived a DoS on .edu network by agent+dero · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I read some comments on "it is likely you'll be able to through Mpps at it?"

    YES, it's happened to us, here on our university boxen, somebody got r00ted, and _crackers_ got in through some backdoors on a LOT of machines, then started DoS'ing my department, we have a small P-II 5.2.1 box tossing packets like nobody's business.

    When the college network runs mostly Gigabit, Mpps is a plausible measure of connectivity.

    --
    Error 407 - No creative sig found
  6. Re:Just wondering... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Face it: DFBSD has not got anything to propose to FreeBSD save Dillon's marketing speeches on various mailing lists and its influence on FreeBSD was abysmal. Hsu's license is _incompatible_ with FreeBSDs goals and thus his code has not been taken verbatim.Of course, some ideas have been borrowed and improved upon. This is no different from the constant stream of improvements DFBSD folks appropriate from FreeBSD5, often with no attribution at all. Frankly, I hardly see any useful stuff in Hsu's code worth facing his assholic personality. If anything, it is DFBSD folks who should be jealous. Hsu has left FreeBSD and _nothing_ has happened. Project continued just fine, in fact, making more progress every day now that this particular obstacle has kindly removed itself.