Porting BGE Driver to IFLIB...

bmeeks

@NollipfSense said in Porting BGE Driver to IFLIB...:

What a dilemma this driver issue is, indeed! Drives me up the wall ... I can clearly see that pfSense hands-off approach is not against us ... it came with the building foundation. We should all tell Intel we're returning the hardware.

@NRgia and I have been in an extensive private chat today and may be on the way to a solution. He is trying a custom compile of a new driver from the lastest ports tree.

NRgia

I have managed to compile the new driver from the new version of intel-ix-kmod that Serghey Kozlvov updated for me.

I have good news and bad news:

The good one: Netmap works in Native mode, and it seems it doesn't use iflib
The bad one: The Speed didn't improve.

Guided by @bmeeks I also did some iperf tests with Suricata stopped(Netmap also stopped) with both drivers:

The tests were done from a LOCAL linux host to pfSense:

With Intel-ix-kmod driver version 3.3.14:
Client connecting to 172.18.0.12, TCP port 5201
TCP window size: 255 KByte (default)

[ 3] local 172.18.0.10 port 44654 connected with 172.18.0.12 port 5201
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 670 MBytes 562 Mbits/sec

With FreeBSD 12.1 in-kernel driver 4.0.1-k:
Client connecting to 172.18.0.12, TCP port 5201
TCP window size: 255 KByte (default)

[ 3] local 172.18.0.10 port 44654 connected with 172.18.0.12 port 5201
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 670 MBytes 562 Mbits/sec

This was not relevant to pin point the culprit, and I will try tommorrow to downgrade to pfSense 2.4.5 - FreeBSD 11.3 to see what speed will I get.

I would also like to thank @bmeeks for assistance on private chat.

I also uploaded the compiled driver for reference
if_ix_ko.zip

NollipfSense

@bmeeks said in Porting BGE Driver to IFLIB...:

@NollipfSense said in Porting BGE Driver to IFLIB...:

What a dilemma this driver issue is, indeed! Drives me up the wall ... I can clearly see that pfSense hands-off approach is not against us ... it came with the building foundation. We should all tell Intel we're returning the hardware.

@NRgia and I have been in an extensive private chat today and may be on the way to a solution. He is trying a custom compile of a new driver from the lastest ports tree.

Awesome ... hooray, applauding!

NollipfSense

@NRgia said in Porting BGE Driver to IFLIB...:

The good one: Netmap works in Native mode, and it seems it doesn't use iflib

That means or suggest it didn't make it into the kernel ... doesn't it? That behavior seems to be the old method that should work with FreeBSD 11.3.

NRgia

@NollipfSense said in Porting BGE Driver to IFLIB...:

@NRgia said in Porting BGE Driver to IFLIB...:

The good one: Netmap works in Native mode, and it seems it doesn't use iflib

That means or suggest it didn't make it into the kernel ... doesn't it? That behavior seems to be the old method that should work with FreeBSD 11.3.

I have asked the maintainer of intel-ix-kmod here https://www.freshports.org/net/intel-ix-kmod to update the ports.

So at least for all the cards that are using this driver we now have 2 options to run NETMAP in Native mode:

Compile from intel-ix-kmod port- And NETMAP will not use iflib
Use the in-kernel driver, which may be old, that uses iflib

If I try the third version, downloading the driver from Intel site directly, and then compile, Netmap will not start in Native mode.

So you are right it will work with FreeBSD 11.3 also

NRgia

Because I don't want to hijack @NollipfSense 's thread anymore I published the speed tests for pfSense 2.4.5-p1 and pfSense 2.5.0 on my initial thread here : https://forum.netgate.com/topic/154014/netmap-not-supported-for-intel-x553-driver-in-pfsense-2-5-0/40

NollipfSense

@NRgia said in Porting BGE Driver to IFLIB...:

Because I don't want to hijack @NollipfSense 's thread anymore

I would not worry about it ... I left the thread open for others, such as yourself who may want to attempt the porting ... thank you for contributing!