New Funded Project: IPv6 Performance Analysis

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.