Re: NetBSD on a Soekris net4801

[Mike Pumford <mpumford%mudcovered.org.uk@localhost>]

On 10/02/2017 21:11, udon%sdf-eu.org@localhost wrote:
> Mike,
>
> If I may ask, what was/is your network speed? I read in the smallwall (www.smallwall.org) documentation that throughput maxes out at around 40-50 Mbps.
> This could be an issue since mine reaches 91 Mbps at times.
20Mbps download 1Mpbs upload. At that point the cpu consumption was at 
100% interrupt time using a pretty simple ipf based firewall 
configuration. The NetBSD driver doesn't support the interrupt 
mitigation functionality of the network interfaces but when I ported it 
in (from OpenBSD) it didn't make that much difference. I'll see if I've 
still got the code somewhere and if I have I'll post it.

Mike

> Thanks,
> udon
>
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 08:18:05PM +0000, Mike Pumford wrote:
> > On 10/02/2017 19:26, udon%sdf-eu.org@localhost wrote:
> > > Hi all, I'm thinking of running NetBSD on a Soekris net4801. It has
> > > 128 MB RAM and 1 GB CF card. Does anybody have experience running
> > > NetBSD on these machines? Do I need a custom kernel for the AMD Geode
> > > CPU on the machines? Is there a good way to reduce wear (for example
> > > swap use) to increase the CF card's life? Thanks, udon
> > Did it for years without any issues on NetBSD 6 right up to the point where
> > I replaced that machine with something a little faster (it was my firewall
> > and it was struggling to keep up with my DSL link at full speed :( ).
> >
> > No custom kernel required. Geode works out of the box on NetBSD 6. Can't
> > remember if I ever got as far as NetBSD 7 before I replaced it.
> >
> > Only tricks I really did to reduce CF wear was to mount the filesystems
> > noatime. Other than that I treated it entirely normally.
> >
> > Mike