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Date:      Wed, 16 Mar 2011 09:26:33 -0400
From:      Steve Polyack <korvus@comcast.net>
To:        Jeremy Chadwick <freebsd@jdc.parodius.com>
Cc:        freebsd-net@freebsd.org, freebsd-stable <freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.org>
Subject:   Re: MAC address / per-proto ARP caching in 8.1-RELEASE
Message-ID:  <4D80BA89.1080300@comcast.net>
In-Reply-To: <20110315182603.GA37095@icarus.home.lan>
References:  <4D7F69FF.2020608@comcast.net> <20110315182603.GA37095@icarus.home.lan>

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On 03/15/11 14:26, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 09:30:39AM -0400, Steve Polyack wrote:
>> Is anyone aware of some sort of facility in either FreeBSD
>> 8.1-RELEASE or the em(4) driver which would cause it to cache MAC
>> addresses / ARP entries for hosts on a per-protocol basis?
>>
>> [snipping remaining details; readers can read it here instead:]
>> [http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2011-March/061908.html]
> The only thing I can think of would be flowtable, but I'm not sure
> if it's enabled by default on 8.1-RELEASE-p2.  You can try the following
> sysctl to disable it (I would recommend setting this in sysctl.conf and
> rebooting; I don't know what happens in the case you set it on a live
> system that's already experiencing the MAC issue you describe).
>
> net.inet.flowtable.enable=0
>
> Details:
>
> http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2009/workshops/presto/papers/p37.pdf
>
I gave this a shot again this morning.  It's definitely related to the 
flowtable:

[spolyack@web01 ~]$ time host web00.lab00 ; sudo sysctl 
net.inet.flowtable.enable=0 ; time host web00.lab00
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

real    0m10.017s
user    0m0.000s
sys    0m0.008s

net.inet.flowtable.enable: 1 -> 0

web00.lab00 has address 10.0.1.129

real    0m0.069s
user    0m0.000s
sys    0m0.003s

I'm still curious as to why this is only breaking new outgoing UDP 
traffic.  New TCP connections aren't affected in the same way at all.  
There also does not seem to be any relevant changes to flowtable code 
between 8.1-RELEASE and 8.2-RELEASE or 8-STABLE.





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