6 ms·
OpenBSD: PF queues break the 4 Gbps barrier
- bell-cot 8mo ago"Values up to 999G are supported, more than enough for interfaces today and the future." - Article "When we set the upper limit of PC-DOS at 640K, we thought nobody would ever need that much memory." - Bill Gates
- WhyNotHugo 8mo agoHonestly, I'm really curious about this number. 10bits is 1024, so why 999G specifically?
- elevation 8mo agoLooks like an arbitrary validation cap. By the time we're maxing out the 64-bit underlying representation we probably won't be using Ethernet any more.
- palmotea 8mo ago> By the time we're maxing out the 64-bit underlying representation we probably won't be using Ethernet any more. We will be using Ethernet until the heat death of the universe, if we survive that long.
- bell-cot 8mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet#History (& following sections) Calling something "Ethernet" amounts to a promise that: - From far enough up the OSI sandwich*, you can pretend that it's a magically-faster version of old-fashioned Ethernet - It sticks to broadly accepted standards, so you won't get bitten by cutting-edge or proprietary surprises *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model
- abound 8mo agoLooking at the patch itself (linked in the article), the description has this: > We now support configuring bandwidth up to ~1 Tbps (overflow in m2sm at m > 2^40). So I think that's it, 2^40 is ~1.099 trillion
- throw0101d 8mo ago> "Values up to 999G are supported, more than enough for interfaces today and the future." - Article Especially given that IEEE 802.3dj is working on 1.6T / 1600G, and is expected to publish the final spec in Summer/Autumn 2026: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabit_Ethernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabit_Ethernet Currently these interfaces are only on switches, but there are already NICs at 800G (P1800GO, Thor Ultra, ConnectX-8/9), so if you LACP/LAGG two together your bond is at 1600G.
- arsome 8mo agoIf you're moving those kind of speeds you're probably not doing packet filtering in software.
- throw0101d 8mo agoBut you may be using Unix-y software to manage the interfaces and do offload programming: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Packet_Processing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Packet_Processing * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptm9h-Lf0gg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptm9h-Lf0gg ("VPP: A 1Tbps+ router with a single IPv4 address") * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulus_Networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulus_Networks
- himata4113 8mo agoI use VPP and handle bonded speeds of 200gbit. Not that far fetched to also do this at 1000gbit.
- mulmen 8mo agoProbably? But if you are then you’re certainly not using OpenBSD.
- bitfilped 8mo agoYes, we're already running 800G networks, so this phrasing seems really silly to me.
- riteshyadav02 8mo ago[dead]
- rayiner 8mo agoCan pf actually shape at speeds above 4 gbps?
- daneel_w 8mo agoWith 7.9, shaping (read: bandwidth rate limiting) no longer tops out at 4 Gbps. PF could always process/transfer beyond 4 Gbps, presuming you had fast enough hardware to handle such bandwidth. The discussed limit was specific only to queues, when using such to shape traffic. If you're asking about OpenBSD/PF's general network performance, it is finally performing acceptably since a couple of years back. You can easily saturate a 2.5 GbE interface with low-end hardware.
- Heer_J 8mo ago[dead]
- ralferoo 8mo agoIn the days when even cheap consumer hardware ships with 2.5G ports, this number seems weirdly low. Does this mean that basically nobody is currently using OpenBSD in the datacentre or anywhere that might be expecting to handle 10G or higher per port, or is it just filtering that's an issue? I'm not surprised that the issue exists as even 10 years ago these speeds were uncommon outside of the datacentre, I'm just surprised that nobody has felt a pressing enough need to fix this earlier in the previous few years.
- citrin_ru 8mo agoAFAIK performance is not a priority for OpenBSD project - security is (and other related qualities like code which is easy to understand and maintain). FreeBSD (at least when I followed it several years ago) had better performance both for ipfw and its own PF fork (not fully compatible with OpenBSD one).
- traceroute66 8mo ago> AFAIK performance is not a priority for OpenBSD project - security is TBF that was the case historically, but they have absolutely been putting in an effort into performance in their more recent releases. Lots of stuff that used to be simply horrific on OpenBSD, such as multi-peer BGP full-table refreshes is SIGNIFICANTLY better in the last couple of years. Clearly still not as good as FreeBSD, but compared to what it was...
- TuxPowered 8mo ago> not fully compatible with OpenBSD one The OpenBSD NAT and scrub syntax, and af-to are available in FreeBSD 15.
- toast0 8mo ago> Does this mean that basically nobody is currently using OpenBSD in the datacentre or anywhere that might be expecting to handle 10G or higher per port, or is it just filtering that's an issue? This looks like it only affects bandwidth limiting. I suspect it's pretty niche to use OpenBSD as a traffic shaper at 10G+, and if you did, I'd imagine most of the queue limits would tend toward significantly less than 4G.
- jamesvzb 8mo ago[dead]
- Heer_J 8mo ago[dead]
- chokan 8mo agodsa
- koala_man 8mo ago> OpenBSD devs making huge progress unlocking the kernel for SMP Isn't this anachronistic for 2026? Am I misunderstand what this means?
- gigatexal 8mo agoIt’s still single threaded. PF in FreeBSD is multithreaded. For home wan’s I’d be using openBSD. For anything else FreeBSD.
- haunter 8mo agoMy local fiber finally offers 4 Gbps connection but I’m not even sure what to use it for lol. I have 2 Gbps and that's more than enough already.
- shpingbing 8mo agoI finally talked myself into going to 3Gbps (and working on internal network to 10). Internal transfer to NAS will be much faster, and downloading AI models should go from ~8 minutes to less than 3 minutes. Is it necessary? Not exactly. But super nice
- darknavi 8mo agoI do nightly offsite mirroring (just to a cloud provider) and making that go faster and not cannibalize all of my throughput is nice.
- holdtman47 8mo ago[dead]
- mdavidyu 8mo ago[dead]
- razighter777 8mo agoI would love to use openbsd. I really wanna give it a try but the filesystem choices seem kinda meh. Are there any modern filesystems with good nvme and FDE support for openbsd.
- gethwhunter34 8mo ago[dead]
- PracticAIl45 8mo ago[dead]
- robutsume 8mo ago[dead]
- AIinfoclip14 8mo ago[dead]
- JumpingVPN2027 8mo ago[flagged]