freebsd announce - Jan 2012 - Foundation Announces Newly Funded Project

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it has awarded Bjoern
Zeeb a grant to analyze the performance of FreeBSD's IPv6 stack. This
project is jointly sponsored with iXsystems.

Last year, Bjoern improved FreeBSD IPv6 support, allowing the
possibility to build a FreeBSD system without IPv4 support. This project
will continue on this work and concentrate on the kernel, looking at the
performance of FreeBSD's IPv6 stack.  Various parties have seen lower
performance when comparing IPv4 to IPv6 on FreeBSD.  While the numbers
seem to differ between releases the causes are mostly unknown.

The project will carry out a detailed performance analysis starting with
benchmarking IPv6 to IPv4 to get up-to-date numbers to better understand
where we are.  It will then continue to identify the origins of
differences in performance, and where possible, directly address them or
identify areas of future work.  Having initial benchmark numbers will
allow changes to be evaluated by re-running the measurements and
quantifying the improvements.

"As the world starts to roll out IPv6 and traffic patterns shift from
IPv4 to IPv6, not only correctness and stability, but also feature
parity and performance matter," said developer Bjoern Zeeb. "Getting
the
performance numbers aligning with IPv4 will ensure that our users will
not need more resources when using IPv6."

"ISC uses FreeBSD extensively across our server infrastructure and have
provided IPv6 services to the community since 2002," commented Peter
Losher,
ISC Sr. Operations Engineer.  "We are excited to support The FreeBSD
Foundation
and Bjoern's efforts to improve IPv6 performance in FreeBSD."

Bjoern Zeeb is a consultant based in Germany and has been an active
FreeBSD committer since 2004. He is currently also a member of the
FreeBSD Security and Release Engineering teams.