FreeBSD Network Status Week 44 2024

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.

• 7dc78150c730 tcp: refactor cwnd during SACK transmissions to allow TSO
• a05620b0f67f sctp: cleanup the addition of addresses which are already known
• 02478e65910a sctp: further cleanup
• d08713dcdb15 sctp: another cleanup

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.

• 28aafeb83c08 netinet*: Add assertions for some places that don't support M_EXTPG mbufs
• 314cb279959b mbuf: Don't force all M_EXTPG mbufs to be read-only
• 01c738cd5c39 if_tuntap: Enable MEXTPG support
• 2bbfbf80d3bb if_bridge: Mask MEXTPG if some members don't support it
• f02d9edfb5d6 ktls: Mark mbufs containing outbound encrypted TLS records read-only

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.

• 03e1f25dcb20 ice: Remove RDMA feature block on E830 devices
• f377a0c7dfa9 ice: Update to 1.43.2-k
• 440addc64249 ice: Update to 1.42.5-k
• f2635e844dd1 ice: Update to 1.42.1-k
• f9a039060e83 ice_ddp: Update to 1.3.41.0
• e53a21abdf29 iavf(4): Get MSI-X BAR index at runtime instead of hardcoding it

if_ffec got some tidy ups.

• 6a7aa5530c0d if_ffec: fix MAC address bootverbose print
• c222619cd480 if_ffec: fix imx6sx compatible flags

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

• f4bd011a3822 ixl.4 + ice.4: intro sentence for HARDWARE notes
• cadb71e4b013 ix.4: update crossreferences to ixgbe.4
• 2d28fd51e5b9 ix.4: describe better
• a340b4649621 ix.4: document LOADER TUNABLES
• d8b48a267fc0 ixgbe.4: rename to ix.4
• 20b823a59bc7 ixgbe.4: Add flow director CAVEAT
• b87b3696c973 ixv: Check cap return before MSI-X enable write
• cdbe3de53837 ixv: Dynamically size the receive packet size
• b0993e3bcaec if_ixv: fix build without NETMAP
• 35d05a14ed7e igc: Remove a bogus register write in igc_if_queues_free()

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.

• 2ac644317e67 iwlwifi,rtw88,rtw89: connect to build again
• 6d67aabd6355 rtw89: update Realtek's rtw89 driver.
• 11c53278a8a3 rtw88: update Realtek's rtw88 driver.
• a4128aad8503 iwlwifi: update Intel's iwlwifi/mvm driver.
• 7b43f4d06419 LinuxKPI: 802.11: adjustments for v6.11 iwlwifi, rtw88 and rtw89
• f0b989348fe6 iwlwifi,rtw88,rtw89: temporary disable build
• ac1d519c01ca LinuxKPI: 802.11: adjustments for v6.11 iwlwifi, rtw88 and rtw89
• 310743c4ccc5 LinuxKPI: 802.11: improvements to (*ampdu_action)() callers
• 86bc7259d3d5 LinuxKPI: 802.11: hookup net80211 callbacks dependent on (*ampdu_action)()

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.

• b6d4e3bee350 ndp: Bring back the -A option for the netlink implementation
• 12c04071cf18 ndp: Move the global variable repeat into struct ndp_opts

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.

• d3916eace506 riscv/vmm: Initial import.
• 7ab1a32cd43c bhyve/riscv: Initial import.
• cf1aba2857c1 freebsd-update: refuse to operate on a pkgbase system

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.

• 28c9b13b236d virtio_p9fs: Simplify vt9p_req_wait() a bit
• 1f6f247b3526 virtio_p9fs: Check for completions after enabling interrupts
• fff518117b40 virtio_p9fs: Fix handling of a full request queue
• b9500cbd3896 virtio_p9fs: Fix some style issues
• f86e328d324d p9fs: Fix whitespace in request tag handling functions

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 )

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