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 .