FreeBSD Network Status Week 43 2024

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.

This was integrated into netstat a little later on:

Netdev

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

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):

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 .