Freebsd IP Forwarding performance (question, and some info) [7-stable, current, em, smp]

[Bart Van Kerckhove]

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Paul / Ingo,
> 
>> I tried all of this :/  still, 256/512 descriptors seem to work the
>> best. Happy to let you log into the machine and fiddle around if you
>> want :) 
I've been watching this thread closely, since I'm in a very similair
situation.
A few questions/remarks:

Does ULE provide better performance than 4BSD for forwarding?
Did you try freebsd4 as well? This thread had a report about that quite
opposite to my own experiences, -4 seemed to be a lot faster at forwarding
than anything else I 've tried so far.
Obviously the thing I'm interested in is IMIX - and 64byte packets.
Does anyone have any benchmarks for DragonFly? I asked around on IRC, but
that nor google turned up any useful results.

<snip> 
> I don't think you will be able to route 64byte packets at 1gbit
> wirespeed (2Mpps) with a current x86 platform.
Are there actual hardware related reasons this should not be possible, or
is this purely lack of dedicated work towards this goal?

<snip>
>Theres a "sun" used at quagga dev as bgp-route-server.
>http://quagga.net/route-server.php
>(but they don't answered my question regarding fw-performance).


the Quagga guys are running a sun T1000 (niagara 1) route server - I happen
to have the machine in my racks,
please let me know if you want to run some tests on it, I'm sure they won't
mind ;-)
It should also make a great testbed for SMP performance testing imho (and
they're pretty cheap these days)
Also, feel free to use me as a relay for your questions, they're not always
very reachable.
<snap>

> Perhaps you have some better luck at some different hardware systems
> (ppc, mips, ..?) or use freebsd only for routing-table-updates and
> special network-cards (netfpga) for real routing.
The netfpga site seems more or less dead - is this project still alive?
It does look like a very interesting idea, even though it's currently quite
linux-centric (and according to docs doesn't have VLAN nor ip6 support, the
former being quite a dealbreaker)

Paul: I'm looking forward to the C2D 32bit benchmarks (maybe throw in a
freebsd4 and/or dragonfly bench if you can..) - appreciate the lots of
information you are providing us :)

Met vriendelijke groet / With kind regards,

Bart Van Kerckhove
http://friet.net/pgp.txt

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