netmap-ipfw on em0 em1

[Jim Thompson]

> On May 4, 2015, at 10:07 PM, Julian Elischer <julian at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> Jim, and Barney. I hate to sound like a broken record, but we really need interested people in the network stack.
> The people who make the decisions about this are the people who stand up and say "I have a  few hours I can spend on this".
> If you were to do so too, then really, all these issues could be worked on. get in there and help rather than standing on the bleachers and offering advise.
> 
> There is no person working against you here.
> 
> From my counting the current active networking crew is about 10 people. with another 10 doing drivers.
> You would have a lot of sway in a group that small. but you have th be in it first, and the way to do that is to simple start doing stuff.  no-one was ever sent an invitation. They just turned up.


I am (and we are) interested.  I’m a bit short on time, and I have a project/product (pfSense) to maintain, so I keep other people busy on the stack.

Examples include:

We co-sponsored the AES-GCM work.  Unfortunately, the process stopped before the IPsec work to leverage this we did made it upstream.
As partial remedy, gnn is currently evaluating all the patches from pfSense for inclusion into the FreeBSD mainline.

I was involved in the work to replace the hash function used in pf.  This is (only) min 3% gain, more if you carry large state tables.

There was a paper presented at AsiaBSDcon, so at least we have a methodology to speak about performance increases.  (Is the methodology in the paper perfect?  No.  But at least it’s a stake in the ground.)

We’re currently working with Intel to bring support for QuickAssist to FreeBSD.  (Linux has it.)  While that’s not ‘networking’ per-se, the larger consumers for the technology
are various components in the stack.

The other flaws I pointed out are on the list of things for us to work on / fix.  Someone might get there first, but … that’s good.  I only care about getting things fixed.

Jim
p.s.  yes, I'm working on a commit bit.