soekris 5501

[Louis Guillaume]

Hi,

I'm wondering if anyone has successfully used the Soekris net5501 with
NetBSD.

My 4501/ipfilter firewall caps the traffic through my 20 meg Internet
service at ~12Mb/s apparently due to the processor speed. So I believe I
need to upgrade.

Specs are listed below. Any help would be fantastic. Thanks,

Louis

* 433 to 600 Mhz AMD Geode LX single chip processor with CS5536
companion chip
* 128-1024 Mbyte DDR-SDRAM, soldered on board
* 4 Mbit BIOS/BOOT Flash
* CompactFLASH Type I/II socket.
* UltraDMA-100 interface with 44 pins connector for 2.5" Hard Drive
* Serial ATA 1.0 interface for Hard Drive, with +5V and +12V power
header
* 1-4 VIA VT6105M 10/100 Mbit Auto MDIX Ethernet ports, RJ-45,
protected with 2KW/100A TVS
* 2 Serial ports, DB9 and 10 pins internal header
* USB 2.0 interface, one internal, one external port
* Power LED, Disk LED, Error LED, Network LED's
* Mini-PCI type III socket. (for t.ex. hardware encryption or
wireless controller)
* PCI Slot, right angle 3.3V signaling only, dual PCI slot option
* 12 bit general purpose I/O, 20 pins header
* Temperature and voltage monitor
* Hardware watchdog
* Board size 6.3" x 6.5"
* Power using external power supply is 6-25V DC, max 20 Watt,
protected with TVS
* Option for 5V supply using internal connector
* Operating temperature 0-60 °C

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[Thor Lancelot Simon]

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 11:38:48AM -0400, Louis Guillaume wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm wondering if anyone has successfully used the Soekris net5501 with
> NetBSD.
>
> My 4501/ipfilter firewall caps the traffic through my 20 meg Internet
> service at ~12Mb/s apparently due to the processor speed. So I believe I
> need to upgrade.

It seems unlikely to me. The 4501 can forward IP between interfaces at
30-40Mbit/sec.

[Louis Guillaume]

Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 11:38:48AM -0400, Louis Guillaume wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm wondering if anyone has successfully used the Soekris net5501 with
>> NetBSD.
>>
>> My 4501/ipfilter firewall caps the traffic through my 20 meg Internet
>> service at ~12Mb/s apparently due to the processor speed. So I believe I
>> need to upgrade.
>
> It seems unlikely to me. The 4501 can forward IP between interfaces at
> 30-40Mbit/sec.
>

Even with NAT? and a few rdr rules? ftp proxy? Maybe ipfilter is the
bottleneck, but I haven't been able to successfully convert to pf:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2008/02/08/msg000191.html

It might also be worth noting that I'm running net-booted. The swap is
nfs-shared.

But the system never appears to run out of memory, nor does iostat show
any nfs activity during an ftp transfer through the firewall to an
internal machine.

But during the same transfer, the CPU gets pegged...

This file transfer goes through the firewall to an internal machine...

ftp> put BookEm.tgz
local: BookEm.tgz remote: BookEm.tgz
229 Entering Extended Passive Mode (|||15014|)
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for 'BookEm.tgz'.
100% |*******************************************************| 13919 KiB
1.06 MiB/s 00:00 ETA
226 Transfer complete.
14253910 bytes sent in 00:12 (1.06 MiB/s)
ftp>

This is iostat during the same transfer...

# iostat -C 2 20
CPU
us ni sy in id
0 0 0 1 99
0 0 0 1 99
0 0 0 16 84
0 0 0 95 5
0 0 0 97 3
0 0 0 97 3
0 0 0 94 6
0 0 0 94 6
0 0 0 77 23
0 0 0 0 100
0 0 0 0 100
0 0 0 0 100
0 0 0 0 100
0 0 0 0 100
0 0 0 0 100
0 0 0 0 100
0 0 0 0 100
0 0 0 0 100
0 0 0 1 99
0 0 0 0 100

Thanks for looking,

Louis

[Jeff Rizzo]

Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 11:38:48AM -0400, Louis Guillaume wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm wondering if anyone has successfully used the Soekris net5501 with
>> NetBSD.
>>
>> My 4501/ipfilter firewall caps the traffic through my 20 meg Internet
>> service at ~12Mb/s apparently due to the processor speed. So I believe I
>> need to upgrade.
>>
>
> It seems unlikely to me. The 4501 can forward IP between interfaces at
> 30-40Mbit/sec.
>

I get substantially lower performance than this with my net4526 - in
fact, it triggers the watchdog at less than 10MB/sec - then again, I'm
using NetBSD-3 along with pf, so YMMV.

+j