11 ms·

OpenBSD – Coming soon to a -current system near you: parallel raw IP input

130 points by peter_hansteen 2y ago

gostsamo 2y ago
How significant is this change? Are there utilities in the server world which do the same but with extra steps instead of having it as an os builtin?
- ianai 2y ago
  Feels a little like rdma or mellanox/ib. Hey, I’d personally love if something openbsd did got it some wider industrial use.
  - bartekrutkowski 2y ago
    Like OpenSSH? ;)
    - normaler 2y ago
      delusional every professional uses PuTTY /s
      - bartekrutkowski 2y ago
        Of course they do. And what is that thing on the other side that Putty connects to for our professional friends in vast majority of cases?
        yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
        ...I was going to make a joke about Windows servers, but actually AFAIK Windows just uses OpenSSH for its SSH server so that kinda proves the point doesn't it?
    - ianai 2y ago
      I mean the actual kernel. But, you know, needs a killer feature people want to deploy at scale.
      - Gud 2y ago
        And like OpenSSH, due to the BSD licensing, it will be quickly be ported to other operating systems. Which is an advantage to us all, a great thing for humanity.
- welcometoC 2y ago
  This is not some sort of "new" feature invented by OpenBSD. It's literally "just" them making their kernel (finally) multi-core instead of locking everything every time a process does networking. Pretty much every other OS out there has done that for years, if not decades. (FreeBSD for almost 20 years, although arguably at first that release was quite unstable.)
  - gostsamo 2y ago
    This is what surprised me. It looks as a common sense approach, but it is on the front page of hn.
    - knorker 2y ago
      I like openbsd for what it is, but they do have a tendency to imply or outright say that the thing they just did is something they invented. Like when they launched W^X (which isn't even an accurate term, because that implies that read-only non-execute pages don't exist), they basically claimed to have invented it. And they said that it was "impossible" to do on 32bit x86. Which was a surprise for those of us who had been running that on 32bit x86 for years, using grsec patches. They defended themselves for this mis-statement by saying that they don't look at what other OSs, like Linux, do. Fair enough, but don't say you're the first to do it, then. OpenBSD was late to the game of multiprocessing, deliberately ignoring multi-CPU machines. They only had to change their minds when suddenly consumer CPUs started being multi-core/multi-threaded. And since they have fewer developers (and not a focus on performance), they've understandably been lagging behind in this space.
      - daneel_w 2y ago
        > "OpenBSD was late to the game of multiprocessing, deliberately ignoring multi-CPU machines. They only had to change their minds when suddenly consumer CPUs started being multi-core/multi-threaded." Which seems like an entirely reasonable choice if they felt there were bigger priorities. OpenBSD received SMP support in November 2004, right at the same time as the first mainstream dual-core CPU arrived on the market. I get what you mean by "late to the game", but I also feel that it's not really a fitting statement.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- daneel_w 2y ago
  For OpenBSD it's significant and somewhat of a milestone because its network stack has been trailing a bit in terms of transfer speeds when compared to e.g. Linux. The kernel has had a lot of "big locks" that hamper executional performance in complex ways across many different venues, and the past few years the developers have been busy cutting these into smaller pieces.
aomix 2y ago
Maybe this will be the return of an OpenBSD home router for me. I ran one for years because it was a fun project but when gigabit became available in my area I learned a low power, passively cooled cpu struggled with gigabit traffic on OpenBSD.
- daneel_w 2y ago
  Throughput depends also on how large (and how well/poorly phrased) your PF rule-set is. Up until 2021 or so my own OpenBSD home router ran on some 14nm era low-power passively cooled Celeron I picked up in 2015, and I managed to get about 700 Mbit/s through that thing. These days anything just slightly snappier will get you 1 Gbit/s throughput.
  - Hikikomori 2y ago
    With the largest packet size? Not very fast then.
- yjh0502 2y ago
  I’ll wait until it gets crash-safe filesystem.
  - daneel_w 2y ago
    FFS can crash quite safely. The chance of lost data is incredibly small, especially with "softdep" out of the way. It just doesn't come back online as fast as a journaled file system will.
  - guenthert 2y ago
    Sure, something like ZFS would be nice, but in a router not needed as you'd mount the fs rw only during update, wouldn't you? Logs are either on a separate, RAM based fs (tmpfs) or (preferably) sent to a remote logging host. You might want to have a look at e.g. https://www.mimar.rs/blog/how-to-increase-openbsds-resilience-to-power-outages https://www.mimar.rs/blog/how-to-increase-openbsds-resilienc...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

How significant is this change? Are there utilities in the server world which do the same but with extra steps instead of having it as an os builtin?

ianai 2y ago
Feels a little like rdma or mellanox/ib. Hey, I’d personally love if something openbsd did got it some wider industrial use.
- bartekrutkowski 2y ago
  Like OpenSSH? ;)
  - normaler 2y ago
    delusional every professional uses PuTTY /s
    - bartekrutkowski 2y ago
      Of course they do. And what is that thing on the other side that Putty connects to for our professional friends in vast majority of cases?
      - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
        ...I was going to make a joke about Windows servers, but actually AFAIK Windows just uses OpenSSH for its SSH server so that kinda proves the point doesn't it?
  - ianai 2y ago
    I mean the actual kernel. But, you know, needs a killer feature people want to deploy at scale.
    - Gud 2y ago
      And like OpenSSH, due to the BSD licensing, it will be quickly be ported to other operating systems. Which is an advantage to us all, a great thing for humanity.
welcometoC 2y ago
This is not some sort of "new" feature invented by OpenBSD. It's literally "just" them making their kernel (finally) multi-core instead of locking everything every time a process does networking. Pretty much every other OS out there has done that for years, if not decades. (FreeBSD for almost 20 years, although arguably at first that release was quite unstable.)
- gostsamo 2y ago
  This is what surprised me. It looks as a common sense approach, but it is on the front page of hn.
  - knorker 2y ago
    I like openbsd for what it is, but they do have a tendency to imply or outright say that the thing they just did is something they invented. Like when they launched W^X (which isn't even an accurate term, because that implies that read-only non-execute pages don't exist), they basically claimed to have invented it. And they said that it was "impossible" to do on 32bit x86. Which was a surprise for those of us who had been running that on 32bit x86 for years, using grsec patches. They defended themselves for this mis-statement by saying that they don't look at what other OSs, like Linux, do. Fair enough, but don't say you're the first to do it, then. OpenBSD was late to the game of multiprocessing, deliberately ignoring multi-CPU machines. They only had to change their minds when suddenly consumer CPUs started being multi-core/multi-threaded. And since they have fewer developers (and not a focus on performance), they've understandably been lagging behind in this space.
    - daneel_w 2y ago
      > "OpenBSD was late to the game of multiprocessing, deliberately ignoring multi-CPU machines. They only had to change their minds when suddenly consumer CPUs started being multi-core/multi-threaded." Which seems like an entirely reasonable choice if they felt there were bigger priorities. OpenBSD received SMP support in November 2004, right at the same time as the first mainstream dual-core CPU arrived on the market. I get what you mean by "late to the game", but I also feel that it's not really a fitting statement.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
daneel_w 2y ago
For OpenBSD it's significant and somewhat of a milestone because its network stack has been trailing a bit in terms of transfer speeds when compared to e.g. Linux. The kernel has had a lot of "big locks" that hamper executional performance in complex ways across many different venues, and the past few years the developers have been busy cutting these into smaller pieces.

aomix 2y ago

Maybe this will be the return of an OpenBSD home router for me. I ran one for years because it was a fun project but when gigabit became available in my area I learned a low power, passively cooled cpu struggled with gigabit traffic on OpenBSD.

daneel_w 2y ago
Throughput depends also on how large (and how well/poorly phrased) your PF rule-set is. Up until 2021 or so my own OpenBSD home router ran on some 14nm era low-power passively cooled Celeron I picked up in 2015, and I managed to get about 700 Mbit/s through that thing. These days anything just slightly snappier will get you 1 Gbit/s throughput.
- Hikikomori 2y ago
  With the largest packet size? Not very fast then.
yjh0502 2y ago
I’ll wait until it gets crash-safe filesystem.
- daneel_w 2y ago
  FFS can crash quite safely. The chance of lost data is incredibly small, especially with "softdep" out of the way. It just doesn't come back online as fast as a journaled file system will.
- guenthert 2y ago
  Sure, something like ZFS would be nice, but in a router not needed as you'd mount the fs rw only during update, wouldn't you? Logs are either on a separate, RAM based fs (tmpfs) or (preferably) sent to a remote logging host. You might want to have a look at e.g. https://www.mimar.rs/blog/how-to-increase-openbsds-resilience-to-power-outages https://www.mimar.rs/blog/how-to-increase-openbsds-resilienc...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]