FreeBSD Network Status Report

FreeBSD Network Status Week 39 2024

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is an experiment in creating tooling driven reports from the FreeBSD development ecosystem, git, code review and bug tracking. The goal is to provide an insight into what has happened in FreeBSD in the last little while, but with limited time to gather, assess and write up what is going on. I am only going to focus on "networking", which for this week was about a third of all commits to main (last week it was about half).

It is a process that will lead to things being missed, don't feel bad, let me know and I'll add the stuff you think is important.

This report was generated on Friday 27th September 2024 for the period between "last week" and "now" as git understand them. The git log command was:

git log --format="%h" --after="last week" --before="now"

With this report the tooling lets me take or leave commits and generates urls and such, but only on the FreeBSD main branch. I'll add stable branches for future reports, but first I want to see what can be done in the allotted time.

I also have searches and a little tooling for dealing with bugs (bugzilla) and reviews (phabricator), but neither of these platforms are as friendly to program as git. That should tell you what they are like.

I plan to write a few of these and if there is demand decided if the time investment is worth it. I'm only going to continue if I think it is worth the work.

Goings on

There are two important events invisible to the development system in the last week, EuroBSDcon and the accompanying DevSummit . While they could show up, it doesn't look like anyone used the "Event:" tag on a commit to main in apart from one GSoc commit earlier in the month.

Stab week ran without much happening, there is 1 reported issue discovered with ixl(4) which has been reverted .

170 commits matched my log command and I thought 64 of them were "networking" based on a cursory glance.

Transport

The regular #transport meeting coincided with the FreeBSD DevSummit. The next meeting is on the 3rd of October 2024, if you have issues with transport protocols (TCP, UDP, SCTP) or the socket layer please join, there is a public meeting link on each agenda page ( accessible via this wiki page ). It is more business like than chat ops, which helps us mostly keep the meetings to less than the planned hour.

Two sets of changes landed in my filter, the MAC change is the first in some further work tidying up the MAC SYN code.

The second are tidying up stuff in the TCP stack. The last remanent of a broken attempt to control burstiness of the TCP stack 20 years ago. We turned it back on a couple of years ago and I'm pretty sure it deadlocked connections immediately. TCP is very difficult.

Netdev

Most of the changes this week land in device drivers, it is most of the kernel after all.

bz@ did some git to add missing tracking for vendored Linux WiFi drivers. The commits are 'empty', but contain evil:

This was done using what I'd call "git magic" provided by Ed no one
else will hopefully ever need again.

Improvements and updates to e1000 (igb, em) have been coming in from kbowling@, with igb updated to 2.25.28-fbsd:

ix/ixgbe has been updated to the latest release (ix-3.3.38) from Intel .

The ixl revert mentioned in the stab week report went in:

bf085659dac9 Revert "ixl: Increase tx/rx ring size to 8160"

On top of this there has been a bunch of tidying up of old code in bfp, iflib and other places by zlei@.

Firewalls

Work has continued to keep FreeBSD pf the best tested firewall:

And some general tidying also landed.

User tooling

tcpdump has been updated to 4.99.5

0a7e5f1f02aa tcpdump: Update to 4.99.5

There have been further commits to nuageinit, which I'm not sure is 100% on topic for a network status report. I do think it is one of the most interesting new tools to be added to FreeBSD for a long time and I'm hoping it'll get a raft of documentation and features to remove the need for cloud-init cloud-init at all.

e72457c4f516 nuageinit: tests: Cleanup

netstat saw some small updates to libxo output and the ntp man page got some attention.

Please send feedback

As I write this my timer is at 58 minutes , so the 1 hour goal seems doable.

I plan to add interesting bugs and reviews, once I figure out how to get them from the relevant places. Once the tooling is more than sparkling git log I'll put it up on a repo somewhere.

I would love to know if this summary was any help, if it was, or if you think I should cover other thing please let me know (thj@freebsd.org).

If you find a typo or have a correct let me know and I'll thank you at the end here.

Thanks to typos and feedback from: - mgdm - hibby - brd@

You can see all prior posts here. ( rss )

My work on FreeBSD is supported by the FreeBSD Foundation , you can contribute to improving FreeBSD with code, documentation or financially by donating to the Foundation .

FreeBSD Network Status Week 40 2024

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Here we are for round 2, last weeks report can be and a little context found here: FreeBSD Network Status Week 39 2024 .

All of the reports so far are available via the networkstatus tag on my blog.

Goings on

Since last week I haven't touched any of the tooling, I have been busy doing something else and it is a good exercise in making these reports "minimal touch". There are some manual edits in the generated template I have had to make today which I will roll into the generation script.

I do read my email (no matter what I might claim) so most commits going by aren't completely new to me.

I am yet to add tooling for getting reviews and interesting bugs, reviews I'm not sure how to figure out as phabricator doesn't have a friendly API. My email contains everything in #transport , #network and #wireless so worst case I just read from email.

Bugzilla has a useable API, Mark Linimon (linimon@) is doing a heroic review of old bugs and squashing those which are out of date. That might be important for you for two reasons, if you have an old bug you care about you should respond to the bug email or it'll be closed and it makes a search of the form "what changed in the last week" far too noisy to interpret right now.

I still plan to include bugs and reviews though.

One point of discussion this week was support of NOINET6 in the kernel build. Users reported that NOINET6 build has been failing due to some changes in pf and two questions were raised. Why are you disabling IPv6 is left for a higher power to explain. Support for non-standard kernel builds is going to get a statement in the handbook or similar to clarify how what is expected of users and developers when running something other than GENERIC.

Anyway, what has been going on in the network stack this week?

My log command

git log --format="%h" --after="last week" --before="now"

found 133 commits from which I thought 39 were relevant for this update.

Transport

The regular #transport meeting occured yesterday . I think a good summary of the meeting and the last week of commits is covered by the second commit in my list 'small cleanup'. The #transport group make continual progress and this call is tracking a few longer running reviews.

I took the call as an opportunity to ask about netdump performance having done one for the first time. teuxen@ made some debugging suggestions and in email after the call we think performance should be ok on 'data center' links. Certainly better than the 5Mbit/s I saw in my test. I will do some more investigation once my current project starts generating enough crash dump to be a problem.

Netdev

Last week saw a flurry of driver updates, this week looks to just be follow ups to that work. Some commits to the Intel driver which were updated last week:

And some tidy ups in other places:

dougm@ has been doing some on the the rounding logic in libkern which hit mlx:

For WiFI there is some organising in LinuxKPI 80211.

0b325167f60d LinuxKPI: 802.11: move functions between header files

Firewalls

Lots of change in pf, I would say this falls into the category of "continuous improvement". pf changes are about half of the network stack stuff I pulled out this week and while there are no major features. Small steps are how things get really good.

User Tooling

Bug fixes in nfs and a robustness change in the dhclient code.

Please Send Feedback

End of writing this week is at ~50 minutes this week, which makes two reports done at an hour each. I'll use those 10 minutes to fix the generation stuff I hand wrote today. Or make coffee.

Fewer tent pole features coming through, but those can't land everyday. I am in two minds about how frequently this should run, a monthly report would be more likely to always carry some meat, but then I would loose an entire Friday once a month to writing about work rather than doing it and I think that would make me a bit sad.

I would love to know if this summary was any help, if it was, or if you think I should cover other thing please let me know (thj@freebsd.org).

If you find a typo or have a correct let me know and I'll thank you at the end here.

Thanks to: - mgdm

You can see all prior posts here. ( rss )

My work on FreeBSD is supported by the FreeBSD Foundation , you can contribute to improving FreeBSD with code, documentation or financially by donating to the FreeBSD Foundation .

FreeBSD Network Status Week 41 2024

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hey folks, here we are rounding out another week of development. This Network Status Report is an experiment I am making on documenting what has been happening in the FreeBSD network stack by generating reports with the help of some simple tooling. This is the third such report, but the first one I've really told anyone about.

The previous reports are available here , some context and goals are available in the first weeks report .

A big change for this week is streaming of the report writing process. I'm hoping that by being more open about this there will be a weekly chance for community engagement - at least for people that like the network stack.

Goings on

Since last week I have integrated collating notes into my tooling (and if you consumed the stream broke the script a little). This means I can capture things going by on the mailing lists more easily for discussion later.

The bugzilla storm continues, when it starts to slow down I'll review pulling in interesting bugs.

What I want from reviews and bugs is a list of interesting things in the last week. That might be new items, but it is also likely to be items that have had a change in the last week, lots of comments, or have finally closed. Landing commits aren't so interesting. I think I have the bugzilla query sorted out, but I cannot for the life of me get sense from the phabricator API.

If you can generate queries that sort of match what I want AND they will give me plain text summaries as helpful as a git --oneline I'd love to see them.

Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit

On the 7th and 8th of November 2024 there will be a FreeBSD Summit kindly hosted by NetApp in their San Jose campus.

So far the program includes:

Pawel Dawidek, Fudo Security on "FreeBSD Security Improvements"
Dorr Clark, NetScaler on “Using FreeBSD in Products"
George Neville-Neil on "OSDB: Turning the Tables on Kernel Data"
Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick on “History of the BSD Daemon”
And more!

The summit is open to the public, with a registration fee of US $150.

Registration and event information is available here:

axgbe CFT

zlei@ has an open call for testing for come changes to the axgbe driver. This changes how the axgbe driver handles the promisc flag, zlei@ doesn't have hardware available to test. If you use axgbe then you should test and report results on the phabricator review.

https://reviews.freebsd.org/D46794

Transport

Oddly not TCP caught in my filter this week, but there have been some improvements around the SCTP API.

tuexen@ has been doing some review of locking and socket options. Generally the socket layer is quite complex, getting this right is difficult.

3326ab87cc22 getsockopt: improve locking for SOL_SOCKET level socket options

Netdev

kbowling@ MFC'd a lot of stuff from the Intel driver changes we covered the past two weeks. That is great news if you are on a stable branch of FreeBSD.

A big change is the re-addition of Adaptive Interrupt Mode for the e1000 series NICS (including lem , em and igb ). AIM gives a balance between latency when there are relatively low packet rates and performance when the link is very busy.

In most cases kbowling@ says:

this might be worth a few sys% on common CPUs, but may be meaningful when
multiplied such as if_lagg, if_bridge and forwarding setups.

3e501ef89667 e1000: Re-add AIM

In WiFi land bz@ landed a nice rtw89 panic fix:

41b746e05231 LinuxKPI: 802.11: fix ieee80211_schedule_txq() to avoid rtw89 panic

And we see some other bits of tidying up in cxgbe , mlx5 and iflib .

Firewalls

A mixture of tidy ups with several changes coming through from OpenBSD. ~~If I were to guess (and I am!) many of these are from presentations and conversations at EuroBSDCon.~~ If I were to ask kp@ he would tell me this was part of an ongoing continuous maintenance project sponsored by Netgate.

And the continued netlinkification of pf .

igoro@ made some tidy up commits to dummymbuf. While I have seen commits go by I hadn't looked into dummymbuf(4) yet. This is test kernel module for unusual mbuf layouts which hooks into the pfil (firewall) layer.

For continued compatibility with libpcap some struct definitions for pflogd were moved out of the header file, preventing others from using them.

User Tooling

Fix stopping sendmail during shutdown.

8751fbe36ff0 rc.d/sendmail: Fix stopping service during shutdown

And finally a big change to kyua, skipped tests no longer report as passing.

99689201a1eb kyua: Do not count skipped as passed in test cmd

Please Send Feedback

As with last week are are at ~50 minutes as I get to this part of the report.

I am going to disseminate this one much further, probably to the freebsd-net and current mailing lists.

I would love to know if this summary was any help, if it was, or if you think I should cover other thing please let me know (thj@freebsd.org).

If you find a typo or have a correct let me know and I'll thank you at the end here.

Boris asked for there to be an rss feed, so there is now one here
Graham Perrin hight lighted a typo in the tags ( tags->tag ) link.
Jim Thompson told me off for guessing.

You can see all prior posts here. ( rss )

My work on FreeBSD is supported by the FreeBSD Foundation , you can contribute to improving FreeBSD with code, documentation or financially by donating to the FreeBSD Foundation .

FreeBSD Network Status Week 42 2024

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hey Folks,

Here we are for the fourth Weekly Network Status Update. The big changes last week in the report were streaming of the writing process and sharing the reports on the freebsd-net and freebsd-current mailing lists.

Thanks to everyone that sent me emails with positive feedback or corrections. All feedback is appreciated, it helps me know if anyone is reading these and it keeps me honest.

Next week there will hopefully be some supporting figures giving a summary of over all changes. I have written the svg and gotten awk making stuff up for me, I just need to get awk generating svg.

Goings on

The bugzilla storm continues, from my reading of my inbox it looks like others have gotten involved tidying up old bugs too. It is great to tidy up the bug tracker, but I'm going to continue waiting a bit before I write the tooling to cover new and changed bugs here. Maybe in a week or two.

I didn't get any feedback on writing tooling against phabricator, I think I'll pull interesting reviews into my notes. From a read this morning there wasn't anything particularly stand out to include. If you want to know whats going on you can look for reviews with #netdev and #transport groups.

Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit

On the 7th and 8th of November 2024 there will be a FreeBSD Summit kindly hosted by NetApp in their San Jose campus.

So far the program includes:

    - Pawel Dawidek, Fudo Security on "FreeBSD Security Improvements"
    - Dorr Clark, NetScaler on “Using FreeBSD in Products"
    - George Neville-Neil on "OSDB: Turning the Tables on Kernel Data"
    - Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick on “History of the BSD Daemon”
    - And more!

The summit is open to the public, with a registration fee of US $150.

Registration and event information is available here:

Performance issues with vnet jails + epair + bridge

There has been some discussion on the freebsd-net mailing about performance issues with VNET jailed applications. The conversation started in September, cc@ has made some points about the performance methodology. I have encountered this problem, TCP single flow over bridge for me stops at 2.5Gbit/s (on a machine that will do localhost TCP single flow at ~40Gbit/s). The issue is real, but we lack comparisons to other platforms to really motivate improvements.

https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-net/2024-September/005510.html

FreeBSD 14.2 Code Slush in Effect

It used to be the case that FreeBSD frozen branches in advance of a release, the freeze was led into by a 'slush' phase where only 'safe' commits were wanted. The Slush phase has started for the 14.2 release. Time to get things MFC'd if you want them in 14.2.

Transport

Netdev

Lots of commits to update the EC2 Elastic Network Adapter by osamaabb@ updating the ena(4) driver to v2.8.0 (and through version v2.7.0 ). Here is one of them:

ce4cc746bb41 ena: Update driver version to v2.8.0

peterj@ has been working improving support for the Quartz64 SBC and as part of that is fixing things in eqos(4) .

bf8d4cfe347b eqos: Fix group address filtering.

More updates to Intel network drivers, with igc(4) getting improved AIM mode support (as igb(4) did last week.

The CFT closed on the axgbe(4) promisc mode change and landed in the tree.

c7a2636889a6 axgbe: Fix setting promisc mode

Netmap buffer pools have been made NUMA-aware, this may help with performance on systems with multiple memory domains as the buffer locality should be much better.

1bae9dc58427 netmap: Make memory pools NUMA-aware

Over in WiFi land rtw89 was turned on after 2 years of being in the tree thanks to improved testing from a group of users.

Updates in the LinuxKPI layer to support updates in iwlwifi

Minor man page changes, for users this rearranges the HARDWARE section which is an excellent source of truth when trying to buy things.

Firewalls

The divapp tool for testing divert sockets has been moved from pf specific into the more general netpfil tests area. And divert tests added for ipfw.

The Scapy port update broke some tests so those needed to be updated:

User Tooling

Ping continues to be an incredibly difficult piece of software to work on. Ping is going to get support for non-root users to control the size of the ICMP request (as it can on other platforms).

Libxo is a flexible way of generating machine readable output from Unix tools and subsystems, many more tools got complete libxo support this week, here are some to the network tools:

Other Interesting Changes

I added this section this week because there were quite a few interesting changes going by that weren't networking specific, but still might be of interest.

A new bsd release!

bdbf50660c51 bsd-family-tree: add macOS 15

Back in July ISA device hints were changed, but the UPDATING message was missed. It is here now:

63e282288ed8 UPDATING: Add belated note about hints for old-school ISA devices

In advance of OCI support on FreeBSD, change the name of OCI to ORACLE. That first OCI is Open Container Initiative and the second one is Oracle Cloud Infrastrcuture - simple.

1be84d745bcc release: move OCI to ORACLE

Please Send Feedback

This weeks report took much longer to write because I was speaking to/at the kind people that joined the stream. Thanks for kp@ and mgdm for keeping me company.

I would love to know if this summary was any help, if it was, or if you think I should cover other thing please let me know (thj@freebsd.org).

If you find a typo or have a correct let me know and I'll thank you at the end here.

You can see all prior posts here. ( rss )

My work on FreeBSD is supported by the FreeBSD Foundation , you can contribute to improving FreeBSD with code, documentation or financially by donating to the FreeBSD Foundation .

FreeBSD Network Status Week 43 2024

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

No stream this week, it would be an odd audio mixture of my keyboard, me coughing and blowing my nose, wondering what the cats are up to (we have a guest doubling the number of cats) and talking about compiler flags. I'll be back on next week if I can match the audio standard. Roughly 1000 UK time on Friday the 1st of November (whichever timezone that is next week).

Goings on

Quiet week on the Network side of things, I've not done this long enough to know if there is a pattern here or not. The big change this week was the import of LLVM 19, newer compilers are stricter which tends to break things. Makes us better through fixing bugs in weird code.

The Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit is in just over two weeks, John made a call for people to register so the correct amount of food could be bought.

Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit

@NetApp San Jose

Program includes:
    - Pawel Dawidek, Fudo Security on "FreeBSD Security Improvements"
    - Dorr Clark, NetScaler on “Using FreeBSD in Products"
    - George Neville-Neil on "OSDB: Turning the Tables on Kernel Data"
    - Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick on “History of the BSD Daemon”
    - And more!

The summit is open to the public, with a registration fee of US $150.

Performance issues with vnet jails + epair + bridge

Mailing list thread

I mentioned this discussion last week and got some feedback on performance of zones on Illumnos, sounds like there is some ground we can tread to catch up.

FreeBSD 14.2 Code Slush in Effet

The 14.2-RELEASE code slush continues. The schedule looks like a start of December release, but it depends a lot on testing. You can help by testing 14/stable for the next week and branches after. I'm not sure if the schdule is posted publicly so I won't include it here until I know if I should.

Known issues are on this wiki page

Stab week

This was the October Stab Week( announcement ). It doesn't look like there was fallout and the test period was ended on Wednesday ( email ).

Transport

Tidy ups in SCTP and TCP. The FreeBSD SCTP stack is used in a lot of places, on small platforms like Chrome for WebRTC data channel.

Network stack

Locking and VNET improvements in the network stack. Locking around VNETs is quite complex, for a while you could do a lot of damage by running a for loop creating VNETs, but we are improving all the time and crashes like that are less common. That means the remaining issues are harder to find, but overall better.

A small change to export route statistics via a sysctl, a lot of netstat involves looking at live kernel memory and it has all the problems you can imagine.

3360a15898ce net: route: convert routing statistics to a sysctl

This was integrated into netstat a little later on:

f3a097d0312c netstat: switch to using the sysctl-exported stats for live stats

Netdev

Small improvement in e1000 which should be a no-op.

77b70ad751df e1000: Move I219 LM19/V19 to ADL

On server restart with kTLS a long start up pause could be observed under high load. The process for allocating TLS memory was running single threaded and blocking the process start up.

Firewalls

Test with style.

Other stuff

LLVM 19 was imported just after stab week ended. Compiler imports break a ton of things, the second commit here is a good example of the compiler getting stricter and call us on our nonesense.

zlei@ did a run tidying up surplus semicolons (here is one, but there were many):

2f395cfda8b5 tcp cc: Remove a stray semicolon

Updates via vendor imports for unbound (to 1.22.0), libarchive and googletest (to 1.15.2):

Please Send Feedback

I would love to know if this summary was any help, if it was, or if you think I should cover other thing please let me know (thj@freebsd.org).

If you find a typo or have a correct let me know and I'll thank you at the end here.

You can see all prior posts here. ( rss )

My work on FreeBSD is supported by the FreeBSD Foundation , you can contribute to improving FreeBSD with code, documentation or financially by donating to the FreeBSD Foundation .

FreeBSD Network Status Week 44 2024

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The report was streamed again this week, I have tried to advertise streaming in all the expected places (discord, irc, BSDNow Telegram). If I missed somewhere let me know.

Goings on

We seem to be back to a much more normal events calendar post-2020. There is a return of a BSD Devroom at FOSDEM and I am hearing about people attending many more events.

It looks like the bugzilla tidy up is calming down, I have it on my todo list to find interesting bugs, but I have gotten bogged down doing other things the last few weeks.

Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit

This is happening next week on the 7-8th of November. If you still want to go and haven't made any plans time is running out.

@NetApp San Jose

Program includes:
    - Pawel Dawidek, Fudo Security on "FreeBSD Security Improvements"
    - Dorr Clark, NetScaler on “Using FreeBSD in Products"
    - George Neville-Neil on "OSDB: Turning the Tables on Kernel Data"
    - Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick on “History of the BSD Daemon”
    - And more!

The summit is open to the public, with a registration fee of US $150.

BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024

After a year off there will be a BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024, the Devroom needs your talks to be successful. The Devroom talks are shorter than conferences than EuroBSDCon so this is a great opportunity to share work in progress with a diverse BSD crowd.

Welcome to the BSD Devroom Call For Participation. The BSD Devroom aims
to provide a dedicated space for presentations covering BSD operating
system family.

Key dates

Proposals can be submitted by October the 30th, 2024
Submission deadline : 1st December 2024 Brussels time
Announcement of selected talks : 15th of December 2024
Conference dates : 1 & 2 February 2025
BSD devroom date : Saturday February 1st, 2025 afternoon (second half)

CFP is here

Transport

I think changes in the transport stack go through phases. We have a regular call every two weeks to discuss things, but it shows mostly as tidy ups and commits landing for extremely long running projects. This SACK change is part of an exceedingly long project by rscheff@ to fix SACK functionality and performance.

Network Stack

Improvements to handling of external data on mbufs. Adding external pages to mbufs is an important way to improve performance when interacting with other subsystems. Everything mbufs is a bit of a minefield.

kTLS is supported in GNUtls.

7200d90644ba ktls.4: note that security/gnutls now supports ktls

Netdev

ice(4) has been updated to 1.43.2-k through some other updates. ice(4) is a good NIC for high performance interfaces.

if_ffec got some tidy ups.

It is great to see multiple families of Intel network drivers getting consistent attention. Tidy ups in man pages are really important for debugging.

bz@ did a series of commits to update wireless drivers using the LinuxKPI for v6.11 which required disabling the drivers from the build. Feedback on the freebsd-src suggested that this can be skipped over in git-bisect and might not be needed.

Firewalls

4a7c6d6206cf pf: Fix handling of v6 loopback connections with pf syncookies enabled

User Tooling

More updates following on the recent changes to ndp. More and more stuff is getting netlink support.

Other Interesting Change

I might have gotten carried away taking other commits, there is a lot of cool stuff going on.

br@ landed support for bhyve on riscv, this was developed over the summer (incredibly quickly) on the SPICE simulator and QEMU. Hardware with support for the riscv 'h' (hypervisor) hasn't shipped yet, but there might be a small run of ASICs (200 boards) later this year.

Amazing to have support for a hypervisor that doesn't really exist yet.

emaste@ fixed an IPv4 address in resolver to be valid (8.8.4.4 vs 4.4.4.4) and it started a conversation about example addresses in our documentation and including IPv6. It is a good to acknowledge that we should use documentation addresses as specified by IANA, it does help if examples are directly usable.

e7f0f4f9206e resolver.5: Fix example Google DNS server address

nuageinit got support for OpenStack network configuration. As more cloud init support lands FreeBSD cloud images are going to get easier and easier to build.

2775b9b0bcc2 nuageinit: add support for OpenStack network config

virtio p9fs implements 9pfs (plan 9 file system) for bhyve making it significantly better to provide file systems to guest in bhyve virtual machines.

Please Send Feedback

I would love to know if this summary was any help, if it was, or if you think I should cover other thing please let me know (thj@freebsd.org).

If you find a typo or have a correct let me know and I'll thank you at the end here.

You can see all prior posts here. ( rss )

My work on FreeBSD is supported by the FreeBSD Foundation , you can contribute to improving FreeBSD with code, documentation or financially by donating to the FreeBSD Foundation .

FreeBSD Network Status Week 45 2024

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

No stream this week, doing the streams in the morning means that if there is any pressure from elsewhere in my life that makes me later they become quite stressful. They also take a big exertion, running a stream and writing at the same time is hard work, even when no one speaks to me.

I am torn about scheduling, things put off tend to get squeezed out, this was a motivator for doing them at the start of the day. As my mornings are proving busy I'm thinking about moving the writing and stream out to 1400 UK time. This has the benefit of being 9am for the East Coast US for most of the year.

Goings on

This is a lighter week for network stack goings on, I'm still a few reports away from being able to pick out a trend. From the reports I have written this week has the fewest taken commits, but it is within 10% of other light weeks. It is 50% the volume of the busiest weeks.

These numbers are very noisy, I have a habit of taking interesting stuff along with the networking stuff.

Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit

The summit started yesterday and there are live streams on YouTube, Day One is here , there isn't a link for Day Two right now you can find it on the FreeBSDProject YouTube channel .

update: Day Two

I caught Ian Evans Talk yesterday while I was making supper, it was great to watch and see how they have built out rural internet infrastructure. It was on a project like this that I first got paid to do cool things with the Internet.

BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024

Welcome to the BSD Devroom Call For Participation. The BSD Devroom aims
to provide a dedicated space for presentations covering BSD operating
system family.

Key dates

Proposals can be submitted by October the 30th, 2024
Submission deadline : 1st December 2024 Brussels time
Announcement of selected talks : 15th of December 2024
Conference dates : 1 & 2 February 2025
BSD devroom date : Saturday February 1st, 2025 afternoon (second half)

CFP info is here

Transport

TCP is very complex, this change fixes setting the congestion window when a SYN is lost. I don't remember talking about what the cwnd was being set to before this change. cwnd goes to 1 if a SYN has to be retransmitted, packet loss during establishment can make your connection very painful.

625835c8b5e8 tcp: fix the initial CWND when a SYN retransmission happened

More tidy ups in the SCTP code, I know that is the only comment I manage most weeks. I think the continued work on SCTP is incredible considering how difficult it is to point at a use case.

Netdev

Improvements to the gve(4) driver which is used in GCE. The live lock commit comes with a wonderful diagram:

gve: Fix TX livelock

Before this change the transmit taskqueue would enqueue itself when it
cannot find space on the NIC ring with the hope that eventually space
would be made. This results in the following livelock that only occurs
after passing ~200Gbps of TCP traffic for many hours:

                            100% CPU
┌───────────┐wait on  ┌──────────┐         ┌───────────┐
│user thread│  cpu    │gve xmit  │wait on  │gve cleanup│
│with mbuf  ├────────►│taskqueue ├────────►│taskqueue  │
│uma lock   │         │          │ NIC ring│           │
└───────────┘         └──────────┘  space  └─────┬─────┘
     ▲                                           │
     │      wait on mbuf uma lock                │
     └───────────────────────────────────────────┘

kbowling@ has made igb(4) work better with misreporting SFP receivers.

15853a5fc954 e1000: Improve igb(4) SFP support

Fix build of ice with options RSS.

6e5650896fe4 ice(4): properly use kernel option RSS

Bluetooth fixes! I'm not sure if I should be surprised, but I am very surprised.

Firewalls

Tests are steadily improving.

Fixes in the build for pf, including making it work when IPv4 is disabled (we would have IPv6 in that case, no need for pf with no ip stack).

Plumbing to allow ipfilter options to be settable during put from rc.conf.

8d6feaaaa26f ipfilter: Set ipf -T optionlist at boot

User Tooling

Ping tests improved, this is good because ping is a core tool which needs attention. There was a lot of churn trying to get the recent 'large ping' change in, more tests more better.

Improvements to tftpd tests, tftpd is an old program that was written to be launched by inetd and this complicated testing. Should we have a tftpd is another question.

79c342aaf86f tftpd: Address flaky tests

Other stuff

Some excellent other commits rolling by, first a change to the vmm interface which enables creation and destruction via a file interface rather than the old sysctl interface. As the commit explains this is a step towards narrowing the privileges required to manage virtual machines.

a97f683fe3c4 vmm: Add a device file interface for creating and destroying VMs

A previous fix to the bell frequency (yes the pc speaker) was accidentally reverted and has been reinstated. The original commit message is a great read:

2416be588ea1 vt: Fix frequency calcuation for bell

Please Send Feedback

I would love to know if this summary was any help, if it was, or if you think I should cover other thing please let me know (thj@freebsd.org).

If you find a typo or have a correct let me know and I'll thank you at the end here.

You can see all prior posts here. ( rss )

My work on FreeBSD is supported by the FreeBSD Foundation , you can contribute to improving FreeBSD with code, documentation or financially by donating to the FreeBSD Foundation .

FreeBSD Network Status Week 46 2024

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The meta discussion is moving to the end of the report, meta meta discussion will hopefully be rare.

Goings on

Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit

The Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit was last week. There were some great presentations which are recorded on the FreeBSD YouTube Channel . I don't know if or when the sessions will be broken up, you can scroll through the recorded live streams to find talks of interest.

BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024

Welcome to the BSD Devroom Call For Participation. The BSD Devroom aims
to provide a dedicated space for presentations covering BSD operating
system family.

Key dates

Proposals can be submitted by October the 30th, 2024
Submission deadline : 1st December 2024 Brussels time
Announcement of selected talks : 15th of December 2024
Conference dates : 1 & 2 February 2025
BSD devroom date : Saturday February 1st, 2025 afternoon (second half)

CFP is here

There are only two weeks left for you to submit something.

FreeBSD 14.2 Code Slush in Effect

From Colin:

This is a reminder that we have one week remaining in the 14.2-RELEASE
code slush and will start BETA builds on November 1st.  The schedule
for the release cycle is:

 ports quarterly branch:  October 1, 2024
 reminder email:          October 7, 2024
 stable/14 slush:         October 18, 2024
 doc/ tree slush:         October 25, 2024
 releng/14.2 branch:      November 1, 2024
 BETA1 build starts:      November 1, 2024
 BETA2 build starts:      November 8, 2024
 doc/ tree tag:           November 8, 2024
    <<< WE ARE HERE >>>
 BETA3 build starts:      November 15, 2024
 ports package builds:    TBD (Between November 8 and 22)
 RC1 build starts:        November 22, 2024
 RELEASE build starts:    November 29, 2024
 RELEASE announcement:    December 3, 2024
 14.1 EoL:                March 31, 2025
 14.2 EoL:                September 30, 2025
 14.* EoL:                November 30, 2028

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/14.2ISSUES

And an update today:

I'm pushing the BETA3 build back by 24 hours so I can re-run this week's
current+stable snapshots; the new container-building code broke stuff but
I *think* I've got it fixed now so I want to try again in case I can get
that into 14.2-BETA3.

This also allows a bit more time for people to look at a vfs issue.  I
already have avg, mckusick, and pho looking at it, but if you know
anything about VFS it would be great to have more eyes; see the thread
"vn_alloc_cyclecount is always zero" and commit ab05a1cf321a.

Note: Colin is only sending these announcements to a private list. I asked him last week if I can share them and he said it wasn't a problem. I'll pester him to share these updates to a public list as well.

Struct ifnet is now hidden

Hi everyone,

Many thanks to everyone involved, either fixing ports, reviewing
changes, or assisting with the API, struct ifnet is now hidden from
drivers and userspace.  This means drivers now use the IfAPI, currently
largely consisting of just getters and setters in place of direct
access, with tools/ifnet/convert_ifapi.sh being a good starting point
for adapting drivers.

In struct ifnet's place is if_t, an opaque pointer.  "Blessed" parts of
the kernel, effectively anything sys/net*, modulo sys/netlink, can
directly access it, as those directories comprise the network stack, so
need direct access, as they manage the interfaces.  Manpage updates
will be coming "soon", I'm hoping in the next few weeks, and will
likely need lots of review and editing.

Again, thanks for everyone's help.  I hope the road forward with this
is not too bumpy.

- Justin

You can find this message on the freebsd-arch mailing list

Removal of `devel/kyua`

Hi,

Kyua has been part of base since 13.0, today it means all supported versions.

The tests in /usr/tests usually have parity with Kyua in base, i.e. even if we
consider older unsupported systems then new features from the latest port
offer limited benefits. Anyway, these cases are not supported.

So, in order to avoid double work and user confusion, the devel/kyua port is
being considered for removal.

The motivation of this notification is to collect comments and suggestions in
case if the removal is not a good idea for some reasons.


Best regards,
igoro

igoro@ has been doing a lot of work on testing, particularly in pf. This message went to to three mailing lists ( see it on freebsd-hackers )

Transport

rscheff@ is continuing his work on improving SACK behaviour. For the last while we have been discussing TSO behaviour and loss. Other changes are tidy ups to have we do calculations and other macros.

Network Stack

As mentioned above we have a nice series of commits tidying up the use of ifnet to make it private:

Improvements to sendfile in the Linux compat code.

a43b745aaf4f linux sendfile: Fix handling of non-blocking sockets

More tidying in the PCB code:

Netdev

It is not often you get a new media type, this comes with a nice explanation:

net: if_media for 1000Base-BX BiDi
1000Base-BX uses two wavelengths, commonly 1310nm, 1490nm, 1550nm, or
1590nm, in a Coarse Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CWDM) arrangement
so that a single fiber strand may carry both upstream and downstream.
It is sometimes referred to as BiDi for bi-directional usage of one
fiber.

Optics must be paired such that the RX and TX wavelengths cross over,
with one side often called U(pstream) and the other D(ownstream).

This technology is useful for increasing link density or working around
construction issues, and is also frequently used as a last mile delivery
technology for FTTx.

78c63ed260fa net: if_media for 1000Base-BX BiDi

And a well known trick for the X520 for lab measurements (no, I don't know this trick).

48ddd1b9f887 ixgbe: Add support for 1Gbit DAC links

MAN PAGES!

The only way you get a reputation for good documentation is by continuous consistent improvement.

Some nice changes in WiFi this week, iwlwifi device require firmware which has been in tree until now. It is going to move out of our source tree to somewhere else and be made available by a 'fw update' package of some sort.

Firewalls

Fixes and tidying in pf and more probe points.

If you have used FreeBSD as a developer of a sysadmin you will have heard about how amazing dtrace is. A major quality of life improvement for anyone having to use dtrace for analysis on a live system are discrete probe points. They let you get logical events and make it so you don't have to read kernel code to guess at what is going on (ala fdt probes).

ipfilter is moving forward!

Other stuff

This was an interesting one:

Use the correct idle routine on recent AMD EPYC servers

We have been incorrectly choosing the "hlt" idle method on modern AMD
EPYC servers for C1 idle. This is because AMD also uses the Functional
Fixed Hardware interface. Due to not parsing the table properly for
AMD, and due to a weird quirk where the mwait latency for C1 is
mis-interpreted as the latency for hlt, we wind up choosing hlt for
c1, which has a far higher wake up latency (similar to IO) of roughly
400us on my test system (AMD 7502P).

This patch fixes this by:

- Looking for AMD in addition to Intel in the FFH
 (Note the vendor id of "2" for AMD is not publically documented, but
 AMD has confirmed they are using "2" and has promised to document it.)

- Using mwait on AMD when specified in the table, and when CPUid says
 its supported

- Fixing a weird issue where we copy the contents of cx_ptr for C1 and
 when moving to C2, we do not reinitialize cx_ptr. This leads to
 mwait being selected, and ignoring the specified i/o halt method
 unless we clear mwait before looking at the table for C2.

fd67ff5c7a6c Use the correct idle routine on recent AMD EPYC servers

I'm not sure what the actual impact of this change is, I would guess a reduction in power consumption on most servers (because most servers are at least 40% idle). It might also improve responsiveness, but probably not at a human observable level.

Please Send Feedback

No stream this week, there was a big gap in last nights sleep (hazards of having a young child) and I'm not sure I would make a lot of sense (if I ever do). I have moved the writing time to be around 9am Eastern Time and will aim to stream in this slot next week.

I would love to know if this summary was any help, if it was, or if you think I should cover other thing please let me know (thj@freebsd.org).

If you find a typo or have a correct let me know and I'll thank you at the end here.

You can see all prior posts here. ( rss )

My work on FreeBSD is supported by the FreeBSD Foundation , you can contribute to improving FreeBSD with code, documentation or financially by donating to the FreeBSD Foundation .

FreeBSD Network Status Week 47 2024

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A cold snap has hit my part of Europe hard and it is feeling very seasonal. The rate of commits seems down this week, that is probably partially the 14.2 release and if I project a bit the weather.

Some nice changes coming in the WiFi stack and to other tools. In other stuff that I'm not covering here there is some good progress on risc-v support.

Goings on

Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit

The videos from the Fall FreeBSD summit have been parted out and are available in this playlist:

BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024

Welcome to the BSD Devroom Call For Participation. The BSD Devroom aims
to provide a dedicated space for presentations covering BSD operating
system family.

Key dates

Proposals can be submitted by October the 30th, 2024
Submission deadline : 1st December 2024 Brussels time
Announcement of selected talks : 15th of December 2024
Conference dates : 1 & 2 February 2025
BSD devroom date : Saturday February 1st, 2025 afternoon (second half)

CFP is here

FreeBSD 14.2 Code Slush in Effet

THe 14.2 Code Slush is running and final (hopefully changes are landing) RC1 build should have started and we might make it without an RC2 build.

The 14.2-RELEASE cycle schedule as it stands now is:

 ports quarterly branch:  October 1, 2024
 reminder email:          October 7, 2024
 stable/14 slush:         October 18, 2024
 doc/ tree slush:         October 25, 2024
 releng/14.2 branch:      November 1, 2024
 BETA1 build starts:      November 1, 2024
 BETA2 build starts:      November 8, 2024
 doc/ tree tag:           November 8, 2024
 BETA3 build starts:      November 16, 2024
 ports package builds:    November 16-18, 2024
    <<< WE ARE HERE >>>
 RC1 build starts:        November 22, 2024
 RELEASE build starts:    November 29, 2024
 RELEASE announcement:    December 3, 2024
 14.1 EoL:                March 31, 2025
 14.2 EoL:                September 30, 2025
 14.* EoL:                November 30, 2028

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/14.2ISSUES

Transport

I think this is mostly tidying things up, the rename is an adventure in sed. Writing these weekly and sitting on the regular transport calls it is sometimes hard to point at new features. I think the consistent development is a feature.

Network Stack

A nice optimization in forwarding code when we detect a blackholed route.

Netdev

Driver improvements around TSO to support Accurate ECN in the future in igc, em and ixgbe.

Lots of movement in WiFi world. adrian@ has popped back up and started working out a queue of stuff for rtwn. There should be some good improvements to throughput and consistency in HEAD if you want to grab that and try.

We are seeing some steps towards higher rates in rtwn as well.

bz@ landed changes to move iwlwifi from the source tree (and therefore shipped kernel modules) out of the tree. This includes support for adding the needed firmware from the installer, assuming you have internet access in the installer.

Firewalls

Netlink API improvements for pf

Fixes to tests and the build. Lots of tests use the packet accounting in FreeBSD which when we started we quickly learned was missing a lot of packets.

Please Send Feedback

I would love to know if this summary was any help, if it was, or if you think I should cover other thing please let me know (thj@freebsd.org).

If you find a typo or have a correct let me know and I'll thank you at the end here.

You can see all prior posts here. ( rss )

This is the 9th edition of the Weekly Network Status report, currently I plan for the last report of the year to be written on the 13th of December.

I have received a lot of very positive feedback which helps me to write these. Right now I intend to start writing these again in the new year, I might do a summary for the Solstice month all at once, or I'll just do a week. I'm not sure yet.

My work on FreeBSD is supported by the FreeBSD Foundation , you can contribute to improving FreeBSD with code, documentation or financially by donating to the FreeBSD Foundation .

FreeBSD Network Status Week 48 2024

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Goings on

14.2 Release Builds should have started today (or be starting?). If all goes to schedule the release will be out the door and announced on Monday the 3th of December 2024.

BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024

The BSD Devroom is back again at FOSDEM this year. The CFP closes on Sunday so this is your last chance to submit something. I hear The FreeBSD Foundation has a stand again this year, so if you want to come and see me in person you could find me there.

Submit early submit often! Now is a bit late, but better than not submitting.

Welcome to the BSD Devroom Call For Participation. The BSD Devroom aims
to provide a dedicated space for presentations covering BSD operating
system family.

Key dates

Proposals can be submitted by October the 30th, 2024
Submission deadline : 1st December 2024 Brussels time
Announcement of selected talks : 15th of December 2024
Conference dates : 1 & 2 February 2025
BSD devroom date : Saturday February 1st, 2025 afternoon (second half)

CFP is here

It was stab week:

On Mon, Nov 25, 2024 at 01:01:05AM -0800, Gleb Smirnoff wrote:
T> This is an automated email to inform you that the November 2024 stabilization week
T> started with FreeBSD/main at main-n273822-ff4c19bb5427, which was tagged as
T> main-stabweek-2024-Nov.

At Netflix testing we didn't discover any new regressions comparing to the
October stabweek.  My personal machines on the new stanpshot are also doing
well.  I didn't receive any emails reporting regressions through the last days,
hence releasing the advisory freeze.

P.S. We are aware of regression in ZFS, that happened between September and
October stabweeks and are working on a reliable reproducer.  A panic happens
when using md(4) device backed by a file on ZFS.

Sounds like there wasn't anything big. This is a reminder that you can directly test your workloads against upcoming releases at a suspected stable point of the tree.

Early testing helps avoid late surprises.

Transport

This is a collision of transport and firewalls ( and I guess packet forwarding). Using the new __tcp_get_flags call teach ppp, pf and ipf about the Accurate ECN AE flag. ECN is one way for the network to communicate with a flow about network conditions.

Small change to memory copying for udp_input , memcpy doesn't need concern itself with overlapping segments and so can be faster.

949190c5afbc udp: Prefer memcpy() over bcopy()

Network Stack

Fix setting the Don't Fragment bit when tunneling IPv6 over IPv4.

c94d6389e428 ipsec: fix IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling.

Netdev

Some e1000 changes, the main one here is a further attempt to better implement auto negotiation according to the standard. The commit message has a lot of details and is worth a click through.

More names for T6 cards:

5c15094916bf cxgbe(4): Update the board names of the T6 OCP cards.

Change the default mode of igc in promisc mode to not show bad packets.

Improvements to mlx5 and family.

Firewalls

Mostly fixes in pf, the first commit here is an improvement to IPv6 fragment handling which just sort of makes me sad. Nothing to do with the change and everything to do with networking.

We have other firewalls too!

User Tooling

With the -n flag the any addr ( 0.0.0.0/0 ) is now printed as default rather than the string default .

9206c7996198 usr.bin/netstat: -n should not print symbolic names

Align domain entry so all upper case domains should work. I was expecting this to be a hangover from the past, but RFC 8881 which specifies this behaviour is from 2023. I bet this has confused a lot of people in the past as we are generally pretty loose with capitalization and domain names.

0347ddf41f42 nfs_commonsubs.c: Make all upper case user domain work

Other stuff

I'm putting this here to highlight it:

Kernel TLS is now enabled by default in kernels including KTLS
support.  KTLS is included in GENERIC kernels for aarch64,
amd64, powerpc64, and powerpc64le.

Please Send Feedback

I would love to know if this summary was any help, if it was, or if you think I should cover other thing please let me know (thj@freebsd.org).

emaste@ would like to know how people are finding these updates. Is it from the mailing list emails, frequent reader of my blog, somewhere else? Please, let me know.

If you find a typo or have a correct let me know and I'll thank you at the end here.

Thanks to:

emaste@ for correcting the order of change inthe netstat -n commit.

You can see all prior posts here. ( rss )

My work on FreeBSD is supported by the FreeBSD Foundation , you can contribute to improving FreeBSD with code, documentation or financially by donating to the FreeBSD Foundation .

FreeBSD Network Status Week 49 2024

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Goings on

BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024

The CFP for the BSD Devroom at FOSDEM closed over the weekend, submitters have been told to expect responses on the 15th of December. I'll provide a run down of upcomming talks in the first status update of 2025.

FreeBSD 14.2 was released

Congratulations to everyone involved and a big thanks to the RE team for getting FreeBSD 14.2 out. The release notes are here

CFT for rtwn, ath and iwn

hi!

I've been working on some net80211 clean-ups and rtwn bugfixes in
preparation for getting the 11ac support for rtwn landed into the tree.

If you're using rtwn, ath or iwn then the latest stuff I've done in -HEAD
may affect you. Please update to the latest -HEAD and let me know if
anything has regressed! (or if it still works fine, that'd be nice to know
too!)

thanks,

-adrian

adrian@ posted a cft for users of rtwn, ath and iwn after recent CURRENT changes

Network Stack

Lots of tidying in netlink.

Tidying in in6_pcbbind . This is a very difficult part of the network stack to work in and tidying here makes things much easier.

Transport

Tidy ups in tcp_hpts .

Netdev

Tie receive packet headers to the correct NUMA domain, this sort of change can help a lot in systems with multiple NUMA domains to reduce cross domain traffic. This happening in iflib makes it 'free' for all iflib drivers.

3d642b0f71c5 iflib: Set the NUMA domain in receive packet headers

Add a big list of skus to igc

850f78d5a191 igc.4: Add I226 and other additions to supported list

adrian@ landed some macros that help with handling ht rates, this makes drivers cleaner:

and he landed a bunch of improvements to rtwn from debugging. Chat in the wifi irc channel suggest that rtwn might get a lot faster soon. If you use rtwn you should test HEAD now to help catch any regressions.

bz@ has landed HT and VHT improvements for the Linux KPI.

Firewalls

Following up on the pf EIM NAT support Damjan Jovanovic has implemented support for EIM NAT for libalias users. If you use ipfw, ppp or netgraph you can now experiment with a more transparent NAT mapping.

Some stability fixes in pf and potential panic fixes.

Other stuff

First up, documentation of a wonderful hack from phk@ to show network traffic in bits per second by running with an 8 second interval. This had a few confused follow ups, it is so simple so people thought it couldn't possibly work.

b5a8abe9502e How to show interface traffic in bits per second

Following on from the excellent Fall Summit talk by Ian from Metify on rural broadband, do a better job of documenting the cellular hardware we support.

53484f516ac4 u3g.4: Fall cleaning

I like the commit message on this one:

4d12c7b9df66 cu.1: describe better + tag spdx

cu.1: describe better + tag spdx Preserve over 40 years of "call UNIX" BSD heritage while answering "one line about what it does" e.g.

"how do I get a serial console?" "% apropos serial"

Make things easier for users to understand, but also preserve the past.

Please Send Feedback

That is all for this week. Next week will be the last report of the year, I'll be travelling (please say hi if you are at 38c3) and I think a report break might be nice.

The first report will probably be on the 10th of January, look for it where you found this one.

I would love to know if this summary was any help, if it was, or if you think I should cover other thing please let me know (thj@freebsd.org).

If you find a typo or have a correct let me know and I'll thank you at the end here.

You can see all prior posts here. ( rss )

My work on FreeBSD is supported by the FreeBSD Foundation , you can contribute to improving FreeBSD with code, documentation or financially by donating to the FreeBSD Foundation .

FreeBSD Network Status Week 50 2024

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Pretty quiet week, driver changes normally come as large series and there aren't a lot this week. This week isn't an outlier.

Goings on

BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024

The schedule for the FOSDEM is online . The BSD Devroom is only a half day with the following sessions:

How FreeBSD security audits have improved our security culture
Wake up, FreeBSD! Implementing Modern Standby with S0ix
Tracking bulk builds in pkgsrc - from Cloud to NetBSD Native
High Performance Packet filtering in BSD. A holistic review
A packet's journey through pf
Making NetBSD as a fast(er) booting microvm
Writing about FreeBSD
FreeBSD audit source and other syslog-ng news

I will be talking about writing about FreeBSD, which means right now I am writing about talking about writing. I'm going to cover avenues in, how and where to publish stuff and the process and idea behind this series of reports.

Network Stack

Swap a tab for a space so in6_ifaddr can be grepped for.

a6a0b8d50e87 in6_var.h: make struct in6_ifaddr declaration searchable with grep(1)

ICMP responses are rate limited, but there might be issues if an attacker could discover the rate limit so a jitter value is applied to the rate limit. This improves the description:

eba715c544ea icmp.4: improve icmplim and add icmplim_jitter description

Netdev

More progress in cxgbe to make TLS offload available by default.

Tidy up a module ordering issue that leads to a hang during module load for iwlwifi.

87e140a5c6f8 iwlwifi: avoid (hard) hang on loading module

API improvements in net80211.

Lot of updates to rtwn moving towards HT (80211n) and VHT (80211ac), adrian@ is talking about doing 50Mbit right now from rtwn which is great progress.

Firewalls

Add a new flag to pfctl to only reset counters for table entries which items logged against them. This preserves the zeroed timestamp on entires with nothing logged.

5b59b0c61e29 pfctl: add -T reset to touch pfras_tzero only for non-zero entries

Catch a state tracking issue after the TCP_AE introductions in the last few weeks in ipfw.

9ea8d692f4cb ipfw: use only needed TCP flags for state tracking

Tidying in netlink.

User Tooling

Add option to allow setting of mount port number for nfs.

0e8a36a2ab12 mount_nfs.c: Add an NFS mount option to set a port# for Mount

Other stuff

Please Send Feedback

This is the 12th Network status report and the final one for 2024.I have enjoyed writing these and plan to pick them up again in the New Year.

I would love to know if this summary was any help, if it was, or if you think I should cover other thing please let me know (thj@freebsd.org).

If you find a typo or have a correct let me know and I'll thank you at the end here.

You can see all prior posts here. ( rss )

My work on FreeBSD is supported by the FreeBSD Foundation , you can contribute to improving FreeBSD with code, documentation or financially by donating to the FreeBSD Foundation .

FreeBSD Network Status Week 03 2025

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Happy New Year and welcome back to FreeBSD Network Status Reports. I hope you had a great time over the Winter Pause (if you did pause) and are ready for another great year of improvements to FreeBSD.

I have opted to do a mega report, there have been 705 commits to FreeBSD main since my last update so we should get going before any more sneak in.

Goings on

BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024

The Devroom program is available here . I am speaking about writing these reports and staffing the Project/Foundation table the rest of the time. I could do with help covering the table (which must always be staffed) for the weekend. If you want to help send me an email (thj@freebsd.org)

Transport

In RACK and BBR there have been a bunch of tidy up changes simplifying code.

I think the other TCP changes fall under maintenance and general code quality. The "don't send beyond advertised window" change is an indicator of how complex TCP is to work on.

Network Stack

Better MTU selection when using ipsec.

f87074000873 ip6_output(): if mtu is not yet computed for ipsec hook, use ifp mtu

Changes in VNET, more socket sysctl parameters are virtualised and there have been some fixes.

Several commits to netlink.

Netdev

Some fixes to mlx5 in SRIOV.

An update for the Cisco Virtual Interface Card driver to better handle MTU changes.

0acab8b3d133 enic(4): fix down/up, MTU changes and more

Wireless

adrian@ has been working on rtwn and it is growing into the WiFi device with the best support. IF you have supported USB hardware and want to try higher rates then testing CURRENT now would be appreciated.

Changes in net80211 and LinuxKPI to support HT and VHT rates. We are getting closer to the Linux KPI drivers having reasonably modern throughputs.

I think from the rtwn stuff some longer standing issues in ath were fixed.

gavin@ has started poking on the Broadcom NICs you might see in old MacBooks.

6ea1ce222c7c bhnd: Fix a few use after frees when releasing resources

Firewalls

Much has happened in PF in the last month. OpenBSD's NAT rewrite support has been partially imported, with accommodation for FreeBSD's existing rule syntax. SCTP support has been expanded and is growing towards TCP support in PF.

There have been test, documentation support and bug fixes to help the NAT write and SCTP handling.

User Tooling

A fix in ping for minimum packet for ping sweeps and better error messages.

Other stuff

This is kind of a WiFi change, but it is important for how FreeBSD deals with firmware. Historically firmware was loaded as a kernel module and then requested by a driver, getting a opaque blob to send to the device. For CVS(?) it has to be uuencoded, which wasn't a real problem for a long time. From 15 firmware can just be loaded from disk as a blob, this frees up drivers a bit certainly making development easier, but it makes it more difficult for things like loader to load kernel modules and know that firmware will be there. Expect some churn. while thinks improve.

Please Send Feedback

There was a lot of stuff in the last month, but I decided to trim out most of the picked commits rather than make a lot of "small improvement" comments on huge series of changes. It is good to see the number of changes that pf gets every week and occasional bursts in other areas.

I would love to know if this summary was any help, if it was, or if you think I should cover other thing please let me know (thj@freebsd.org).

If you find a typo or have a correct let me know and I'll thank you at the end here.

You can see all prior posts here. ( rss )

My work on FreeBSD is supported by the FreeBSD Foundation , you can contribute to improving FreeBSD with code, documentation or financially by donating to the FreeBSD Foundation .

FreeBSD Network Status Report 2025 Week 04

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Goings on

FOSDEM 2025 is next weekend and we are fortunate this year to once again be running the BSD Devroom. The program is on the schedule

I need help staffing the Project/Foundation table at FOSDEM, if you want to help send me an email (thj@freebsd.org).

13.5 code slush in effect

The schedule currently looks like this:

ports quarterly branch:  January 1, 2025
reminder email:          January 13, 2025
stable/13 slush:         January 24, 2025
doc/ tree slush:         January 31, 2025
releng/13.5 branch:      February 7, 2025
BETA1 build starts:      February 7, 2025
BETA2 build starts:      February 14, 2025
doc/ tree tag:           February 14, 2025
BETA3 build starts:      February 21, 2025
ports package builds:    TBD (Between February 14 and 28)
RC1 build starts:        February 28, 2025
RELEASE build starts:    March 7, 2025
RELEASE announcement:    March 11, 2025
13.4-RELEASE EoL:        June 30, 2025
13.5-RELEASE EoL:        April 30, 2026
Branch EoL:              April 30, 2026

You can find the current issues for the release on this wiki page https://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/13.5ISSUES .

This is the final release in the 13 cycle.

Network Stack

Previously this would always increment the first counter in the array. Accounting is really difficult! But good accounting can help you find interesting bugs .

ce52baebd3b3 icmp6: Fix ICMP6 message type counters

The netlink API is getting more attention. I think we will see more network subsystems move towards netlink in the future so improvements here are always good.

d521362f8f7e netlink: fix build
ddc7fd6641c3 netlink: provide snl_clone() to create a secondary snl state
f2a4eed3e13b netlink: underscore snl_get_genl_family_info() to discourage its use
fb63082c0cc6 netlink: provide snl(3) API for variable length raw data attribute

"A GARP is always transmitted when an IPv4 address is added to an interface."
b4bd97ec168e netinet tests: basic garp test
38fdcca05d09 netinet: enter epoch in garp_rexmit()
013784c967f9 netinet: virtualize net.link.ether.inet.garp_rexmit_count

Netdev

After a short 5 years (!!!) in review we have a new network adapter in USB umb(4) . This gives us support for cellular modems and makes fail over setups on FreeBSD possible. These are normally just data modems so we don't have a FreeBSD phone (yet).

markj@ is continuing fixing races in inpcb.

7cbb6b6e28db inpcb: Close some SO_REUSEPORT_LB races, part 2

Wireless

adrian@ has continued his long series of changes to improve rtwn, if you want easy wifi in a random machine picking up a usb wifi device and testing it would help make this even better. More so if you work or visit somewhere with an interesting network like a huge campus or a University.

Improvements to handling of bluetooth firmwarein iwm WiFi devices.

Firewalls

More work on NAT in pf and supporting tests. The pace of pf development is incredible.

UPDATE: kp@ told me I missed the point of these changes the message should be something more like:

Ported OpenBSD's NAT64 pf implementation, extended it to support SCTP,
dummynet and if-bound mode. As a bonus added test cases.

"Don't send bug reports to kp@"

User Tooling

Did you know that you can boot over http using the efi loader?

2f35419fb26d stand/efihttp: Add device type check to efihttp_fs_open()

Other stuff

Wider address space support on arm64, I can't find evidence of any hardware supporting this, but you can test in qemu or the arm simulator.

3041b636463d arm64: Support mapping a 52-bit physical adddress K

Sad news for the few keeping PowerMacs alive (but probably not surprising), Add a depreciation notice for firewire.

cda74c35cb37 firewire: Add deprecation notice

Please Send Feedback

I would love to know if this summary was any help, if it was, or if you think I should cover other thing please let me know (thj@freebsd.org).

If you find a typo or have a correct let me know and I'll thank you at the end here.

You can see all prior posts here. ( rss )

My work on FreeBSD is supported by the FreeBSD Foundation , you can contribute to improving FreeBSD with code, documentation or financially by donating to the FreeBSD Foundation .

FreeBSD Network Status 2025 Week 05

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Here we are 8% of the way through the year and the end of January. Perfect time to check in with what is going on in FreeBSD.

Goings on

BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024

I'm writing today above the North Sea on my flight to AMS on the way to Brussels for FOSDEM. The BSD Devroom is running tomorrow (Saturday the 1st of Feb) and there is a great line up of talks. If you are within a reasonable travel distance head over, its a free event and there is a ton of stuff going on.

Beyond the talks there will be a FreeBSD table for the project and the foundation. We have stickers and I'll be there if you want to chat about goings on in the project or to complain about some of the bugs I've written recently.

Stab week

This was the first stab week of the year and two regressions were picked up through repeatided stabbings:

Compilation failure on 32-bit platforms. Fix [5289625dfecb] (https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/?id=5289625dfecb)
Instant panic with SO_REUSEPORT_LB and nginx. Fix 06bf119f265c

glebius@ is adding scripts to make it easier to know when it is time to stab. I'm hoping more tooling involves and we start getting more testing in the stab weeks. The work Netflix is doing here is incredibly helpful for the quality of FreeBSD, but other workloads should also be represented.

Network Stack

Caught in stab week was a regression in the TCP listen operation when it is called multiple times on a socket. This was harmless generating multiple TCP state changes until last week after a clean up fixing races where started to call LIST_REMOVE() twice on the same entry.

Style and small fixes for netlink and netlink/route support.

ip6addrctl manages address selection policy for outgoing packets. With some improvements teach it how to run in a jail.

Netdev

Replace the single global admin taskqueue with a per interface admin taskqueue. This should resolve timeouts when long operations are performed without using too much more in resources.

3ad01642fe9e iflib(4): Replace admin taskqueue group with per-interface taskqueues

Add a device id to ure, otherwise it will use the CDC mode driver. If you have issues with USB Ethernet you might want to look to see if moving from the CDC driver will help.

dc273058cb0b ure(4): Add support for ELECOM EDC-QUA3C

Wireless

Some further fixes around firmware loading for iwm and its integrated bluetooth controller.

Add support for Blueooth Secure Simple Pairing - which I didn't manage to look up before getting on a plane.

4ae0fa8a2f8b ng_hci: add support for Bluetooth Secure Simple Pairing

Firewalls

This is the third week of changes adding support for NAT64 with some more changes coming in via OpenBSD.

User Tooling

Netcat is the network swiss army knife, an incredibly useful and flexible tool for doing stuff that requires you to put packets onto the network. It is great exemplar of how to use networking options and used more and more by network tests. There was an issue in this stab period around SO_REUSEPORT_LB , making testing more practical helps catch issues closer to their introduction.

04a3ca71ead6 netcat: Add a flag to enable the use of SO_REUSEPORT_LB

Other stuff

Nice fix from mckusick@ to UFS1 file system helping with the inevitable passage of time.

1111a44301da Defer the January 19, 2038 date limit in UFS1 filesystems to February 7, 2106

Defer the January 19, 2038 date limit in UFS1 filesystems to February 7, 2106

UFS1 uses a signed 32-bit value for its times. Zero is January 1, 1970 UTC. Negative values of 32-bit time predate January 1, 1970 back to December 13, 1901. The maximum positive value for 32-bit time is on January 19, 2038 (my 84th birthday). On that date, time will go negative and start registering from December 13, 1901. Note that this issue only affects UFS1 filesystems since UFS2 has 64-bit times. This fix changes UFS1 times from signed to unsigned 32-bit values. With this change it will no longer be possible to represent time from before January 1, 1970, but it will accurately track time until February 7, 2106. Hopefully there will not be any FreeBSD systems using UFS1 still in existence by that time (and by then I will have been dead long enough that no-one will know at whom to yell :-).

It is possible that some existing UFS1 systems will have set times predating January 1, 1970. With this commit they will appear as later than the current time. This commit checks inode times when they are read into memory and if they are greater than the current time resets them to the current time. By default this reset happens silently, but setting the sysctl vfs.ffs.prttimechgs=1 will cause console messages to be printed whenever a future time is changed.

Please Send Feedback

Smaller report this week. I'm trimming out more "small fixes" style comments. I'm going to play with the format of these posts more over the next few months. I am trying to add value beyond just rewriting commit messages, sometimes it is good to show the continuous on going work, but it will get a bit tedious if that is 60% of the report each week.

I'm giving a FOSDEM talk tomorrow on the writing of these reports.

I would love to know if this summary was any help, if it was, or if you think I should cover other thing please let me know (thj@freebsd.org).

If you find a typo or have a correct let me know and I'll thank you at the end here.

You can see all prior posts here. ( rss )

My work on FreeBSD is supported by the FreeBSD Foundation , you can contribute to improving FreeBSD with code, documentation or financially by donating to the FreeBSD Foundation .

FreeBSD Network Status Report

FreeBSD Network Status Week 39 2024

Goings on

Transport

Netdev

Firewalls

User tooling

Please send feedback

FreeBSD Network Status Week 40 2024

Goings on

Transport

Netdev

Firewalls

User Tooling

Please Send Feedback

FreeBSD Network Status Week 41 2024

Goings on

Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit

axgbe CFT

Transport

Netdev

Firewalls

User Tooling

Please Send Feedback

FreeBSD Network Status Week 42 2024

Goings on

Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit

Performance issues with vnet jails + epair + bridge

FreeBSD 14.2 Code Slush in Effect

Transport

Netdev

Firewalls

User Tooling

Other Interesting Changes

Please Send Feedback

FreeBSD Network Status Week 43 2024

Goings on

Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit

Performance issues with vnet jails + epair + bridge

FreeBSD 14.2 Code Slush in Effet

Stab week

Transport

Network stack

Netdev

Firewalls

Other stuff

Please Send Feedback

FreeBSD Network Status Week 44 2024

Goings on

Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit

BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024

Transport

Network Stack

Netdev

Firewalls

User Tooling

Other Interesting Change

Please Send Feedback

FreeBSD Network Status Week 45 2024

Goings on

Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit

BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024

Transport

Netdev

Firewalls

User Tooling

Other stuff

Please Send Feedback

FreeBSD Network Status Week 46 2024

Goings on

Fall 2024 FreeBSD Summit

BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024

FreeBSD 14.2 Code Slush in Effect

Struct ifnet is now hidden

Removal of devel/kyua

Transport

Network Stack

Netdev

Firewalls

Other stuff

Removal of `devel/kyua`