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Comment by gnoway | Hacker News Reader

Note that UBNT claims line rate throughput and provides proof via a commissioned Tolly report (no idea on their legitimacy).

The fbsd image yields ~250mbps between two gigabit hosts.

I've been eyeing one of these for a while and putting fbsd on it interests me, but not if it means a huge peformance drop (even if I wouldn't really miss it).

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Assuming UBNT is correct and the device supports line-rate throughput, I don't think there's any reason why FreeBSD couldn't easily support that.

The freebsd-mips mailing list already has a few threads discussing this; if you want to know why the router isn't achieving line-rate speeds "out of the box", you'll probably get the best answer there (and maybe even someone who knows how to fix the problem):

* http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-mips/2014-January...

* http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-mips/2014-Februar...

If you don't get a suitable answer there, you can also try freebsd-net:

* http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-net/

UBNT is correct, but only for the hardware fast path. The driver for that appears to be proprietary.

I think you're right about the driver. There's some more info about that here: https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/mips/Octeon

To get any decent performance you have to use a horrible binary blob kernel module that offloads (certain very specific use cases) to hardware acceleration. See this post for more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7282258

UBNT's numbers are using the hardware fast path, which presumably is not supported by this project.

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