FreeBSD Network Status Week 48 2024

Goings on

14.2 Release Builds should have started today (or be starting?). If all goes to schedule the release will be out the door and announced on Monday the 3th of December 2024.

BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024

The BSD Devroom is back again at FOSDEM this year. The CFP closes on Sunday so this is your last chance to submit something. I hear The FreeBSD Foundation has a stand again this year, so if you want to come and see me in person you could find me there.

Submit early submit often! Now is a bit late, but better than not submitting.

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

It was stab week:

On Mon, Nov 25, 2024 at 01:01:05AM -0800, Gleb Smirnoff wrote:
T> This is an automated email to inform you that the November 2024 stabilization week
T> started with FreeBSD/main at main-n273822-ff4c19bb5427, which was tagged as
T> main-stabweek-2024-Nov.

At Netflix testing we didn't discover any new regressions comparing to the
October stabweek.  My personal machines on the new stanpshot are also doing
well.  I didn't receive any emails reporting regressions through the last days,
hence releasing the advisory freeze.

P.S. We are aware of regression in ZFS, that happened between September and
October stabweeks and are working on a reliable reproducer.  A panic happens
when using md(4) device backed by a file on ZFS.

Sounds like there wasn't anything big. This is a reminder that you can directly test your workloads against upcoming releases at a suspected stable point of the tree.

Early testing helps avoid late surprises.

Transport

This is a collision of transport and firewalls ( and I guess packet forwarding). Using the new __tcp_get_flags call teach ppp, pf and ipf about the Accurate ECN AE flag. ECN is one way for the network to communicate with a flow about network conditions.

• 347dd0539f3a tcp: add TH_AE capabilities to ppp and pf
• 0fc7bdc97836 tcp: extend the use of the th_flags accessor function

Small change to memory copying for udp_input , memcpy doesn't need concern itself with overlapping segments and so can be faster.

• 949190c5afbc udp: Prefer memcpy() over bcopy()

Network Stack

Fix setting the Don't Fragment bit when tunneling IPv6 over IPv4.

• c94d6389e428 ipsec: fix IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling.

Netdev

Some e1000 changes, the main one here is a further attempt to better implement auto negotiation according to the standard. The commit message has a lot of details and is worth a click through.

• bceec3d80a3c e1000: Try auto-negotiation for fixed 100 or 10 configuration
• 4020351325c0 e1000: Remove old itr sysctl handler
• 7390daf87c53 e1000: Style txrx
• 6f14883066f1 e1000: Style pass on if_em

More names for T6 cards:

• 5c15094916bf cxgbe(4): Update the board names of the T6 OCP cards.

Change the default mode of igc in promisc mode to not show bad packets.

• e80419da6cef igc: disable hw.igc.sbp
• c7fb7b5d9fcd igc: Style pass igc_txrx
• 9efc7325f1ac igc: Reflow long lines
• d1bb1a501118 igc: Normalize indentation a bit

Improvements to mlx5 and family.

• 253a1fa16b98 mlx5: Fix handling of port_module_event
• 67f93079075b mlx5e tls: use non-sleeping malloc flag is it was intended
• 81b38bce0794 mlx5e tls: Ensure all allocated tags have a hw context associated
• 0d38b0bc8fbc mlx5en: fix the sign of mlx5e_tls_st_init() error, convert from Linux to BSD
• 4cc5d081d8c2 mlx5en: only enable to toggle offload caps if they are supported
• cca0dc49e0ca mlx5en: move runtime capabilities checks into helper functions
• 64bf5a431cbe mlx5_en: style function prototype

Firewalls

Mostly fixes in pf, the first commit here is an improvement to IPv6 fragment handling which just sort of makes me sad. Nothing to do with the change and everything to do with networking.

• 56b7685ae328 pf: handle IPv6 fragmentation for route-to
• b9c0321d54e9 pf: Fix source node locking
• 1a5dc6ee62b3 pf: Set cleared time when zeroing stats for table addresses
• 9f9cf83f114a pf: Use a single pointer to state in pf_src_connlimit()
• 45d108ee147c pf_route6(): one more __sdt_used annotation
• e0bf7bc3b2ba pf: reduce indentation level in pf_dummynet_route()

We have other firewalls too!

• e012d79c9c73 ipfw: fix order of memcpy arguments.
• a46c121db4a5 netpfil tests: make dummynet tests more robust

User Tooling

With the -n flag the any addr ( 0.0.0.0/0 ) is now printed as default rather than the string default .

• 9206c7996198 usr.bin/netstat: -n should not print symbolic names

Align domain entry so all upper case domains should work. I was expecting this to be a hangover from the past, but RFC 8881 which specifies this behaviour is from 2023. I bet this has confused a lot of people in the past as we are generally pretty loose with capitalization and domain names.

• 0347ddf41f42 nfs_commonsubs.c: Make all upper case user domain work

Other stuff

I'm putting this here to highlight it:

Kernel TLS is now enabled by default in kernels including KTLS
support.  KTLS is included in GENERIC kernels for aarch64,
amd64, powerpc64, and powerpc64le.

• af1ef35a0066 RELNOTES: Document that ktls is now enabled by default
• b2f7c53430c3 ktls: Enable by default

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).

emaste@ would like to know how people are finding these updates. Is it from the mailing list emails, frequent reader of my blog, somewhere else? Please, let me know.

If you find a typo or have a correct let me know and I'll thank you at the end here.

Thanks to:

• emaste@ for correcting the order of change inthe netstat -n commit.

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 .