PPTP move to a kernel module?

[Michael da Silva Pereira-3]

Hi,

I've been messing about a bit, and having spent some time working on a
box with a high amount of connections. Kinda made me want to look at a
better implementation of PPTP to have a high capacity high reliable
solution.

I was thinking if it would be possible to create a kernel module to
handle the data between the Net and PPPd directly. This was not having
to send the PPTP from kernel to user space to basically just encapsulate
/ decapsulate and then send back to PPPd
Kind of the same way PPPoE handles its connections.

If this was possible we would perhaps no longer need 2 processes per
session, perhaps 1 main controlling daemon. Using a PPP module to
interface to the kernel (same way rp-pppoe.so) ?

I'm not sure if this is a option, perhaps the developers could comment?

Thanks,
Mike

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[James Cameron-2]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 08:41:43PM +0200, Michael da Silva Pereira wrote:
> I was thinking if it would be possible to create a kernel module to
> handle the data between the Net and PPPd directly.

Been done.  http://accel-pptp.sourceforge.net/  Latest release
2009-01-27.

Perhaps you'd like to push it upstream into the Linux kernel?

--
James Cameron                         http://quozl.netrek.org/
HP Open Source, Volunteer             http://opensource.hp.com/
PPTP Client Project, Release Engineer http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/

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[Charlie Brady-13]

On Thu, 23 Apr 2009, James Cameron wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 08:41:43PM +0200, Michael da Silva Pereira wrote:
> > I was thinking if it would be possible to create a kernel module to
> > handle the data between the Net and PPPd directly.
>
> Been done.  http://accel-pptp.sourceforge.net/  Latest release
> 2009-01-27.

Looks like it might not be quite production ready.

> Perhaps you'd like to push it upstream into the Linux kernel?

Sounds a good move.

---
Charlie


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Is anyone from the poptop project involved?

Cheers
!3runo
from Brazil

--- Charlie Brady <charlie_brady@...> escreveu:
> > > I was thinking if it would be possible to create a kernel module to
> > > handle the data between the Net and PPPd directly.
> >
> > Been done.  http://accel-pptp.sourceforge.net/  Latest release
> > 2009-01-27.
>
> Looks like it might not be quite production ready.

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[James Cameron-2]

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 09:34:18AM -0300, Bruno@... wrote:
> Is anyone from the poptop project involved?

I'm not involved yet.  I don't know who else is involved, perhaps the
commit history or the source attribution could tell you?

--
James Cameron                         http://quozl.netrek.org/
HP Open Source, Volunteer             http://opensource.hp.com/
PPTP Client Project, Release Engineer http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/

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[Peter Volkov Alexandrovich]

В Чтв, 23/04/2009 в 08:33 -0400, Charlie Brady пишет:
> On Thu, 23 Apr 2009, James Cameron wrote:
> > http://accel-pptp.sourceforge.net/  Latest release 2009-01-27.
>
> Looks like it might not be quite production ready.

Yes, it looks like that, but I'm using it in production on two servers
and for more then year with 300-500 concurrent connections each they
oopsed only twice and regretfully I failed to gather oops log. That's
said now I'm keeping both servers with netconsole running so I hope to
gather backtrace at some point of time...

Anyway it works really nice: uptime/processor usage and most important
for us ping delays are really small. If you are Gentoo user you may try
ebuild from my overlay:

svn co http://overlays.gentoo.org/svn/dev/pva/net-dialup/accel-pptp

and just emerge accel-pptp :)

--
Peter.


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[James Cameron-2]

On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 07:03:57PM +0400, Peter Volkov wrote:
> Yes, it looks like that, but I'm using it in production on two servers
> and for more then year with 300-500 concurrent connections each they
> oopsed only twice and regretfully I failed to gather oops log. That's
> said now I'm keeping both servers with netconsole running so I hope to
> gather backtrace at some point of time...

Sounds good.  Hope you catch it.  Don't forget the possibility that the
Oops is in entirely different code, or induced by it.

> Anyway it works really nice: uptime/processor usage and most important
> for us ping delays are really small.

Can you be more precise about those numbers?  I'm not being defensive,
I'd love to see PPTP move to the kernel, but it will happen more easily
if there are hard reproducible performance improvements.

--
James Cameron                         http://quozl.netrek.org/
HP Open Source, Volunteer             http://opensource.hp.com/
PPTP Client Project, Release Engineer http://pptpclient.sourceforge.net/

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[Peter Volkov Alexandrovich]

Hi James. Sorry for long delay, I haven't noticed you mail earlier.

В Срд, 06/05/2009 в 08:49 +1000, James Cameron пишет:
> > Anyway it works really nice: uptime/processor usage and most important
> > for us ping delays are really small.
>
> Can you be more precise about those numbers?

Right now I have 360 clients running and channel is loaded 80 Mbit/s. At
the same time my Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 3040 @ 1.86GHz (with
hyper-threading enabled) system loads system like this:

vpn-1 ~ # vmstat 1
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa
 1  0      0 350552   2076 401976    0    0     0     4    3    0  0 13 86  0
 0  0      0 350544   2076 401976    0    0     0     0 22978 1693  0 24 76  0

The most important improvement we got was ping delay. Previously it
jumped from 2 to 40-60 miliseconds. Right now it's just 2-4ms.

> I'm not being defensive, I'd love to see PPTP move to the kernel, but
> it will happen more easily if there are hard reproducible performance
> improvements.

Well in my case it's not easy task to do better tests but probably it's
really interesting to compare nubmers better. If I'll managed to do
tests there I'll mail results here.

--
Peter.


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