Few questions from newbie

[NiCrAm]

Hi,
First of all I'd like to say Hello to everybody. I'm new in OpenBSD so please bear with me. I've used debian so far and I wonder to change system to openbsd because of pf and carp.
I Have Dell R900 Server and I've installed vmware esxi 5.5 on it. I'd like to install OpenBSD as pppoe server (accel-pppd) and traffic sharper. But i've few doubts. When I used OpenBSD lastely it was about 10 years ago and this wasn't effective system, but very secured. Some people told me, that OpenBSD still has some imprtant defects, like pf doesn't work with multi procesors machine, it binds to one procesor and uses only it (my machine has 4 Xeons, 16 cores), and that not every good lan cards works like a charm :/
My target is to provide pppoe-server to 5000 users (now about 2k) with traffic conntrol and firewal/masquerade.
Can anybody tell me it is true about pf with multicore and lan cards? Does OpenBSD will be best choice for pppoe-server?

Nicram

[ocicat]

Originally Posted by NiCrAm

Some people told me, that OpenBSD still has some imprtant defects, like pf doesn't work with multi procesors machine, it binds to one procesor and uses only it (my machine has 4 Xeons, 16 cores),

Welcome!

This topic has recently been discussed on misc@:

http://marc.info/?t=142429878000007&r=1&w=2

...& in particular, this response points that both networking & pf(4) are still limited to CPU0. If performance is a focus of yours, reading this thread (beginning with the first link above...) will be worthwhile reading.

[LeFrettchen]

Wellcome NiCrAm

Originally Posted by ocicat

This topic has recently been discussed on misc@...)

Well, you can also find some informations about PF on the OpenBSD website :

http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/perf.html

Will multiple processors help?
PF will only use one processor, so multiple processors (or multiple cores) WILL NOT improve PF performance. HOWEVER, under some circumstances, running the SMP version of OpenBSD (bsd.mp) instead of bsd will give better performance due to differences in how interrupt handling is done. In many cases, bsd.mp will give less performance. IF you are seeing performance problems, experiment with this, most users will never hit any limits to worry about it.

[NiCrAm]

Ok, thanks for answers.

[rocket357]

There seems to be a lot of interest surrounding SMP capabilities lately, which henning@ touched on here. Slide 33, in particular regarding your questions, but overall it looks like a good bit of effort has gone into SMP. In other words, it is on the roadmap, but not there yet.

Personally, I'm patient enough to wait for $feature to be coded carefully and deliberately rather than whipped together and forgotten in order to maintain feature parity with competing vendors.

[Oko]

Originally Posted by NiCrAm

pf doesn't work with multi procesors machine, it binds to one procesor and uses only it (my machine has 4 Xeons, 16 cores), and that not every good lan cards works like a charm :/

That topic has been beaten up to death on FreeBSD, pfSense, DragonFly, and OpenBSD mailing lists. FreeBSD has 5 year old version which is optimized for multi core machines. It is defacto a fork of the obsolete version of PF. "Rumors" are that version is much slower that new rewritten version of PF which can make a use only of one core. In spite the fact that FreeBSD might soon decide to remove PF all together in favor of native IPFW in part due to the fact that it is stuck with bunch of PF bugs, DragonFly people decided to do their own multi core optimization. Their version of PF is similar if not older than FreeBSD. I personally would look for Henning Brauer posts and discussions in particularly with Luigi (IPFW guy) from FreeBSD camp. It is pretty revealing why the decision to stick to one core was made early on and why OpenBSD people are so reluctant to implement multicore PF. Whole this discussion of mitlicore PF version vs new OpenBSD version also revels and important truth about PF. It is not very portable and it has always been written to work on OpenBSD.


I think you will be fine with OpenBSD regardless of this academic discussion we are having now. Now if you have 20 Gigabit or 50 Gigabit network I would be first one to tell you that OpenBSD might not be the right OS for you (at least not yet).