FreeBSD Network Status Week 03 2025

Happy New Year and welcome back to FreeBSD Network Status Reports. I hope you had a great time over the Winter Pause (if you did pause) and are ready for another great year of improvements to FreeBSD.

I have opted to do a mega report, there have been 705 commits to FreeBSD main since my last update so we should get going before any more sneak in.

Goings on

BSD Devroom at FOSDEM 2024

The Devroom program is available here . I am speaking about writing these reports and staffing the Project/Foundation table the rest of the time. I could do with help covering the table (which must always be staffed) for the weekend. If you want to help send me an email (thj@freebsd.org)

Transport

In RACK and BBR there have been a bunch of tidy up changes simplifying code.

I think the other TCP changes fall under maintenance and general code quality. The "don't send beyond advertised window" change is an indicator of how complex TCP is to work on.

Network Stack

Better MTU selection when using ipsec.

Changes in VNET, more socket sysctl parameters are virtualised and there have been some fixes.

Several commits to netlink.

Netdev

Some fixes to mlx5 in SRIOV.

An update for the Cisco Virtual Interface Card driver to better handle MTU changes.

Wireless

adrian@ has been working on rtwn and it is growing into the WiFi device with the best support. IF you have supported USB hardware and want to try higher rates then testing CURRENT now would be appreciated.

Changes in net80211 and LinuxKPI to support HT and VHT rates. We are getting closer to the Linux KPI drivers having reasonably modern throughputs.

I think from the rtwn stuff some longer standing issues in ath were fixed.

gavin@ has started poking on the Broadcom NICs you might see in old MacBooks.

Firewalls

Much has happened in PF in the last month. OpenBSD's NAT rewrite support has been partially imported, with accommodation for FreeBSD's existing rule syntax. SCTP support has been expanded and is growing towards TCP support in PF.

There have been test, documentation support and bug fixes to help the NAT write and SCTP handling.

User Tooling

A fix in ping for minimum packet for ping sweeps and better error messages.

Other stuff

This is kind of a WiFi change, but it is important for how FreeBSD deals with firmware. Historically firmware was loaded as a kernel module and then requested by a driver, getting a opaque blob to send to the device. For CVS(?) it has to be uuencoded, which wasn't a real problem for a long time. From 15 firmware can just be loaded from disk as a blob, this frees up drivers a bit certainly making development easier, but it makes it more difficult for things like loader to load kernel modules and know that firmware will be there. Expect some churn. while thinks improve.

Please Send Feedback

There was a lot of stuff in the last month, but I decided to trim out most of the picked commits rather than make a lot of "small improvement" comments on huge series of changes. It is good to see the number of changes that pf gets every week and occasional bursts in other areas.

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 .