2 questions regarding PF

Paul Onyschuk blink at bojary.koba.pl
Wed Nov 3 04:16:25 PDT 2010


FreeBSD and NetBSD with ten times bigger teams still use PF from
OpenBSD 3.*? There isn't single initiative to change that, moreover
FreeBSD is sticking with ipfw and NetBSD started creating own
implementation - NPF.

There was discussion here and there, why they started creating NPF
instead of updating PF. Even OpenBSD developers knows that PF code
become messy with time going by - you can check presentation from this
year AsiaBSDCon [1]. So I'm impressed what Jan Lentfer has done (thank
you!).

Besides that PF isn't MP-friendly, as you can say same about OpenBSD.
Situation ain't going to change any soon - one of the main reason
for writing NPF from scratch. Maybe it isn't big and direct problem for
DragonFly BSD, but completely different locking model can be.

I'm just saying... PF within OpenBSD relies also on changes made to
other subsystems. Tracking those hooks is probably easier, when you go
version after version, than with huge number jump.

[1] http://www.openbsd.org/papers/asiabsdcon2010_pf/index.html

-- 
Paul Onyschuk <blink at bojary.koba.pl>





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