[talk] So Netgate bails on FreeBSD

[Jim Thompson]

> On May 24, 2018, at 8:08 AM, George Neville-Neil <gnn at neville-neil.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 24 May 2018, at 7:43, Franco Fichtner wrote:
> 
>>> On 24. May 2018, at 12:23 AM, George Neville-Neil <gnn at neville-neil.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Exotic?  No.  It's logical as is DPDK.  They target Linux because Linux is the gorilla and because Intel wanted to bypass dealing directly with the Linux clowns and their clown kernel and clown community.
>> 
>> The only winners are 6WIND and Intel, selling SDKs and NICs to
>> anyone with loose change.  The time to market is easily 5 years
>> ago.
> 
> The code also runs on Chelsio and it is open source so one can make it their own, which is how that thing works.

And Melanox, and every decent arm64 SoC aimed at the networking space.  (Marvell, NXP, Cavium Thunder-X, Annapurna, ...)

No SDK required, since it’s all Apache or BSD licensed. 

>> Reel in enough profit to buy more SDKs to accelerate VPN and
>> other stuff.  The cycle never ends.  Bottom line is vendors all
>> have the same offering, the only difference they claim is higher
>> high speed.
>> 
>> It's a lose-lose for anyone attempting a product now, especially
>> one that claims "open source based" and asks for community help.

I didn’t ask so much as point out the existing effort to bring VPP to FreeBSD  and invite others to participate. 

> I'd love to see an alternative.  Luigi's work is nice but no one is really picking it up.  Again, hands, time and attention?

It looks straight forward to integrate netmap into VPP and that opens every NIC on FreeBSD, especially as the iflib effort progresses further.  That would also eliminate Franco’s paranoia about Intel/DPDK, and provide security benefits at the cost of about 10% top-end performance. 

We’ve already shown 14Mpps l3 forwarding on a single core. 100Gbps the easy way (1500 byte frames) only requires a bit under 9Mpps.

VPP over netmap is the ultimate netmap-fwd. (Luiz agrees, btw.)

>>> I've poked at this off and on for a bit but I've not had time to make much progress on this.  Jim's call for hands is a serious one, it would be nice to have a few folks poke at this and make it actually portable.
>> 
>> Please don't advocate volunteering for Netgate.  FreeBSD is a better place without the drama they used to induce for at least
>> half a decade.

Naked aggression much, Franco?

The point was to port VPP to FreeBSD. I’ve already pointed out the ports for clixon and cligen, (brought back an old committer).

> Funny, I wasn't advocating for that, I was pointing out that Jim's call is the right one.  

Thanks. 

> In open source people can put up or shut up (or as we say on FreeBSD, "Shut up and code.") so, I'd be interested in alternatives but I've yet to see any that are viable.  I also know how many hands it would take, and it's more than 2 or 4.
> 
> Best,
> George
> 
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