FreeBSD Network Status Week 42 2024

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:

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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 .

df on FreeBSD

I thought it would be a lot of fun to run Dwarf Fortress on the Pinebook Pro. Take this deceptively CPU intensive game, run it via a amd64->arm64 translation layer on a mediocre SOC.

df has a native Linux build which is nice to avoid too much translation (WINE is never fun to configure), so this seem straight forward. I will save you the details, but this resulted in a Pinebook Pro with neither X or WiFi drivers installed.

apt is a hell of a drug.

FreeBSD has as Linux Compat layer , maybe getting df running on FreeBSD would be relatively easy?

No.

The packaged CentOS layer seems to be EOL and I'm not sure what is coming next. I wasn't able to figure out easily how to get SDL2_image to be picked up. There are still lots of linker references to libmd 6 floating around and that was enough hassle.

Searching packages I stumbled onto this gem, linux-dwarffortress .

Is running df on FreeBSD easy?

Yes! 

$ sudo pkg install linux-dwarffortress
$ dwarffortress

It is version 0.47.05 from back in 2021, but that is good enough for me.

I will try box64 on Linux when the Pocket Reform eventually shows up.

FreeBSD Network Status Week 41 2024

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 40 2024

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.

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 39 2024

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:

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

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.

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 .

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