# HELP. FreeBSD 81. polling issue,



## mjstudio (Aug 25, 2010)

Hi,

I got an issue of freeBSD 8.1 polling issue on my PC. It is a double-core Intel Pentium x86 PC (2.8GHz each core). The Ethernet interface is Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit Ethernet interface.
I set the following options (enable polling and zero-buffer copy) and rebuilt the kernel:

```
# To make an SMP kernel, the next two lines are needed
options         SMP                     # Symmetric MultiProcessor Kernel
device          apic                    # I/O APIC

options DEVICE_POLLING # Open Polling
options HZ=1000
options ZERO_COPY_SOCKETS
```
The following were appended to the /etc/sysctl.conf

```
kern.polling.enable=1
# increase BPF buffer to 10M
net.bpf.bufsize=10485760
net.bpf.maxbufsize=10485760
kern.polling.idle_poll=1
kern.polling.burst_max=1000
```

After installed and rebooted the system, kern.polling.enable was not found in MIB so I had to ignore this error. Looks like kern.polling.enable is removed from FreeBSD v8.1?
Everything looked good so build my application to received data from another HP server. I wrote the application using libpcap-1.1.1 with BFP zero-copy turned on (I found the #define HAVE_ZEROCOPY_BPF 1  in config.h). Attached please find the source code of my application.

Before running the application, I set the following parameters:

```
ifconfig bge0 polling     # This will turn on the polling of the Broadcom driver.
```


```
sysctl -w net.bpf.bufsize=10485760 
sysctl -w net.bpf.maxbufsize=10485760
sysctl -w kern.polling.idle_poll=1
sysctl -w kern.polling.burst_max=1000
sysctl -w kern.polling.each_burst=128
sysctl -w net.inet.ip.intr_queue_maxlen=256
```

Then I ran the application to receive data from the HP server. I ran multiple iperf on the HP server to send around 133Mbits/s UDP load to the PC under test. The UDP payload size was 47 bytes. The entire IP packet size is 76 bytes.

First of all, the receiving application worked well and received around 255K packets/second without packet losing (I checked the receiving status using pcap_stats). However, after 2 minutes, the application can not received data any more. The packets/second is 0. I ran the ping from the PC under test and found that the ping reporting timeout and destination unreachable (the ping from HP to the PC also failed). Looked like the link between the HP server and PC was broken so the application could receive data. No packet was dropped. Then I restart the bge0 interface using: `ifconfig bge0 down && ifconfig bge0 up`

And then I re-ran the application and it continued receiving data. But after 1 or 2 minutes, the link broke again. I think it was my application that caused the bge0 interface down. I started the tcpdump and it worked well without breaking the link. 

I tried to increase the kern.polling.each_burst from 128 to 500 but the application would cause the bge0 down within 1 minute. No packet was dropped before the link was down.

I checked the CPU usage of the PC. The sys used is around 90% (might be caused by kern.polling.idle_poll=1), user land is 13%. 
I donâ€™t understand why the application would break the bge0.

Could anybody have a look at this issue? How can I optimize the performance of the polling?

Thanks,
Jin


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## dennylin93 (Aug 25, 2010)

Try posting this on the mailing lists. Most of the developers are there, so there's a higher chance of someone taking a look at this.


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