VPP on FreeBSD | Hacker News Reader

VPP on FreeBSD

ipng.ch

93 pointsbpbp-mango7 comments

I'm away from my FreeBSD machines at the moment so can't provide much real help, but I will say, for a packet test like this, hyperthreads don't usually help and often hurt. But I thought most of the FreeBSD intel drivers will set up at least as many NIC queues as threads by default, assuming the NIC can manage that many. The quad 1G nics might only do 4 queues (I'm not super familiar with all the limits there), but ix and ixl should do 8 if that's what you want to do.

Might have to tweak the driver options, which would probably be set in /boot/loader.conf and need a reboot.

I'd imagine freebsd-net should be pretty helpful too, of course.

VPP dev here. Our perf tests for Intel run in CSIT lab consistently shows a perf benefit of 10%-20% since Haswell I believe, so in our typical VPP deployment we usually map 2 VPP workers (dataplane threads) to both hyperthreads of the same physical core. But that's for VPP, your mileage may vary depending of your workload (eg. FreeBSD kernel stack).

VPP (tnsr) and FreeBSD (pfsense) user / dev here.

The FreeBSD scheduler is at fault here. It’s that simple.

currently only supported in Debian and Ubuntu, but cool to see BSD getting in on the action ahead of other players like Arch or Redhat! im very excited to see how this performs for things like a load balancer.

bigger concern is that VPP performance with vHost is limited by the Qemu vHost driver, so KVM might take some time to catch up here. Also cant seem to get any of the performance benchmark graphs and dashboards to load as of rn.

> currently only supported in Debian and Ubuntu, but cool to see BSD getting in on the action ahead of other players like Arch or Redhat

VPP is available in AUR and there is nothing stopping anyone from building and running it on RHEL or any other Linux distro. A former employer had a commercial deployment on a custom RHEL derivative.

VPP dev here. Yes, we had support for OpenSuse and RHEL/CentOS in the past, but distro support vanished. We're a small team so we need to focus (note: for OpenSuse it's still maintained by a volunteer, just not in CI/CD), but we're open :) FreeBSD fundation decided it was important for them and we're happy to help!

Pretty interesting port !

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