Feature #14802
open
Re-enable multiqueue support for virtio NIC
0%
Description
In current versions of pfSense (2.7.0, 23.05.1) multiqueue support for virtio NIC has vanished. Apparently this was done to support ALTQ. This is a serious new limitation for high throughput virtualized routers. Please re-add support for multiqueue on virtio. If this is driver limitation please at least allow us to choose between ALTQ or multiqueue enabled drivers for vitio like it is for other NIC's in pfsense.
Not sure whether this is a bug or request for a feature to be re-added.
Updated by Nazar Mokrynskyi over 1 year ago
I second this request, can't get more than ~2.5Gbps out of interfaces because of this, which is really annoying.
Was debugging a bunch of stuff and this appears to be the root cause.
Updated by Nazar Mokrynskyi over 1 year ago
I'd appreciate if maintainers could take a look at this
Updated by Christopher de Haas about 1 year ago
The issue is discussed in this forum thread https://forum.netgate.com/topic/138174/pfsense-vtnet-lack-of-queues. However, the last post dates all the way back to March 2021. Any chance we can get an update on this issue?
Updated by Bernhard Schmidt 2 days ago
A colleague bravely tested this by building a new kernel for pfSense 2.7.2 with just ALTQ for vtnet disabled. We did some throughput tests with iperf3 with varying numbers of parallel connections on a Proxmox host. The stock version never scaled to more than 2,8 Gbit/s, regardless of parallel connections and vCPUs.
Stock pfsense 2.7.2 -P2 ca. 2,8 Gbit Frankensense 2.7.2 -P2 ca. 4.4 Gbit Frankensense 2.7.2 -P4 ca. 6,22 Gbit Frankensense 2.7.2 -P8 ca. 8,77 Gbit (likely CPU-bound, tests with more than 4 vCPU pending)