Hi you OpenBSD pro:s…
I have question regarding PF and thread use in kernel. If I got it right PF is single thread. Today the firewall I use uses a Jetway JNF9HG-2930 longlife 4 core N2930 @ 1.83GHz Celeron mainboard. It runs an OpenBSD 6.2 stable SMP kernel as I have not seen a penalty to use it over the uni kernel. The only kernel tuning I have done is to set net.inet.ip.ifq.maxlen=4096 to avoid the drops that I could see (on IPv6 as well...). I have 1/1 Gbit connection and fill almost the the whole pipe (approx 970 Mbit at 0.9 ms ) during speed tests. I am *very* *very* satisfied with OpenBSD :) here.... 970-980 Mbit speed tests load the kernel to approx 30% in my case. Yes, we route packet and not mega bytes.... :) I know... Now… I will soon have 10/10 GBit (not that I really need it though). For that I will switch over to a Xeon D-1521 with a Supermicro 2 x Intel 10 Gbit x540 PCI-e x8 card. This D-1521 is 2.2 GHz with turbo to 2.7 GHz and has just 2 cores. Now to the question… I have read the turbo is used automatically in CPUs under the right circumstances and the frequency increases against the turbo speed if very few cores are uses. I could very well test all cases to come to a conclusion. But still, I want to ask about your performance thoughts here. What is your opinion here if we talk about pure firewalling. Uni or smp? The question is with the thoughts in mind to be able to use the extra turbo frequence… The question is maybe stupid. But then, well, it is because I ask before dig deep into docs :) Tnx /Peo
