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Bugzilla has a useable API, Mark Linimon (linimon@) is doing a heroic review of old bugs and squashing those which are out of date.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 )

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