Any tips for tuning NetBSD for NAT?

[Dave Huang]

Hi, I have a Soekris net5501 (AMD Geode LX 433MHz, VIA VT6105M Rhine
III ethernet) running NetBSD-current from June 2015 and pf as a NAT
box. I just upgraded my internet speed to 100Mbps down/10Mbps up, and
it seems that the net5501 is a bottleneck. When downloading a large
file, I'm getting about 70Mbps, and "systat vm" shows that 99%+ of the
CPU is processing interrupts (and user processes are very sluggish
too).

Is there anything I can tune to reduce the CPU load (switch to npf?
tune sysctls?), or is the hardware just not up to NATting 100Mbps?

[Joerg Sonnenberger]

Post by Dave Huang
Is there anything I can tune to reduce the CPU load (switch to npf?
tune sysctls?), or is the hardware just not up to NATting 100Mbps?

I can't comment on the goal of doing 100Mbps, but the hardware is
extremely bad when it comes to network processing. The CPU is weak and
the network chip is about the worst PCI design ever.

Joerg

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[Dave Huang]

Post by Joerg Sonnenberger
I can't comment on the goal of doing 100Mbps, but the hardware is
extremely bad when it comes to network processing. The CPU is weak and
the network chip is about the worst PCI design ever.

OK, even if it can't pass packets at 100Mbps, is there anything that
can be done to keep user processes from starving? I'm also running
BIND on the machine, and while a large transfer is in progress, BIND
hangs for long enough that clients asking it to resolve names give up.

[Michael Richardson]

Post by Dave Huang
Is there anything I can tune to reduce the CPU load (switch to npf?
tune sysctls?), or is the hardware just not up to NATting 100Mbps?

Correct. Use IPv6.


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[Petar Bogdanovic]

Post by Dave Huang
Hi, I have a Soekris net5501 (AMD Geode LX 433MHz, VIA VT6105M Rhine
III ethernet) running NetBSD-current from June 2015 and pf as a NAT
box. I just upgraded my internet speed to 100Mbps down/10Mbps up, and
it seems that the net5501 is a bottleneck. When downloading a large
file, I'm getting about 70Mbps, and "systat vm" shows that 99%+ of the
CPU is processing interrupts (and user processes are very sluggish
too).

My ALIX (AMD Geode 431.65-MHz, VIA VT6105M Rhine III) runs FreeBSD 8.1
(build date 2012) with pf+nat+altq (mostly priq on the upstream) and
during the download of a 4GB dvd I get around 11.0MB/s while the ALIX
cpu seems to have 15-30% spare time.

No BIND, though.

Petar

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[Dave Huang]

Post by Petar Bogdanovic

Post by Dave Huang
Hi, I have a Soekris net5501 (AMD Geode LX 433MHz, VIA VT6105M Rhine
III ethernet) running NetBSD-current from June 2015 and pf as a NAT
box. I just upgraded my internet speed to 100Mbps down/10Mbps up, and
it seems that the net5501 is a bottleneck. When downloading a large
file, I'm getting about 70Mbps, and "systat vm" shows that 99%+ of the
CPU is processing interrupts (and user processes are very sluggish
too).

My ALIX (AMD Geode 431.65-MHz, VIA VT6105M Rhine III) runs FreeBSD 8.1
(build date 2012) with pf+nat+altq (mostly priq on the upstream) and
during the download of a 4GB dvd I get around 11.0MB/s while the ALIX
cpu seems to have 15-30% spare time.

Interesting... I tried OpenWrt 15.05-rc3 on the net5501, and it's also
able to get around 11MB/s. CPU usage is about 97% though. So it does
seem like NetBSD could do much better.

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