Provide firm date on multicore/thread support

[Seimus]

Hello ZenArmor team,

Reading thru several posts, your documentation, road-map, there is set a target to have ZenArmor support multicore/thread architectures. This topic goes for quiet some time now, the date of delivery of this essential feature is always moved.

In your H/W sizing docs is written Q1, 2024 which is long past due. It was moved to Q2, and then in some forum post is randomly mentioned Q3/4.

I think and many will too, having support for multicore is more essential than SASE and other features...

Why?
Because your product is designed to be implemented on LAN side. Due to the fact that ZenArmor is resource heavy and runs only one core, it creates a bottleneck for InterVlan routing. As the H/W throughput sizing actually limits the backplane.

A lot of users and customer may have limited WAN BW, however the story for LAN is completely different we can scale up to 10G connections for Intranet networks.

Can you please state and provide firm date when this multicore support will arrive and deliver it.

Regards,
S.

[almodovaris]

You cannot force them to make it ready before it's ready.

But business-wise it is a dumb decision to handle other less important security stuff, rather than boosting the bandwidth performance of Zenarmor 4 times or 8 times or how many cores you have.

Personally, I have no need of going above Gigabit internet in the coming five years, but many businesses do.

[Seimus]

You are bit missing the point I am trying to make.

This is not about forcing, but uphold the commitment they made. They did the commitment by setting the target on their Road-Map. But so far its always postponed.

https://www.zenarmor.com/roadmap

Mid-term - Multi-core scalability
Mid term: 6-12 Months

This was already missed by quiet by margin of time.

Business-wise having proper multi-core support gives sense, because this will open the product to more customers and users that doesn't have a single CORE CPU strong enough to run at least 1G throughput InterVLan or their Speed of WAN with Zenarmor.

Personally, I have no need of going above Gigabit internet in the coming five years, but many businesses do.

Another point as I mentioned, this is not only about "Internet Speed" but about throughput you are able to achieve between two different LAN networks - InterVLAN.

Regards,
S.

[sy]

Dear Fellow Zenarmor Users,

We had to change multi-core support priority at the beginning of this year for the critical SSE and TLS inspection features. The team is started to work for multicore support and planning to ship at the en of the year. Many thanks to all for your patience and cooperation.

[Seimus]

Dear Fellow Zenarmor Users,

We had to change multi-core support priority at the beginning of this year for the critical SSE and TLS inspection features. The team is started to work for multicore support and planning to ship at the en of the year. Many thanks to all for your patience and cooperation.

Sy, thank you for replying back on this topic, much appreciated.

I am glad to hear you plan to ship it end of Q4 2024. If you and ZenArmor team agree please lets use this thread to track the progress or possible (hopefully not) delays in regards of the multi-core feature.

In any case if possible let us know any news around it.

Regards,
S.

[Greg_E]

Is there a way to run beta versions of Zenarmor in OPNsense? Might be worth configuring a different repo for those of us that might be willing to try.

[sy]

Hi,

The team is working on the repo change feature. It will be available to change it on UI. For now, we can share when the multicore support feature is in beta version with volunteer testers.

[Greg_E]

Great, I don't want an Alpha version, but by Beta it would probably be stable enough for me to put on my production system and really run it.

If possible, just give us an "easy" way to roll back to the production version during testing.

I know that OPNsense hardware is AMD based, but a lot of us are Intel based, if it comes down to one or the other, just let us know which one is ready for testing. I might be able to work up one of my AMD processor test machines and put it back into production.

And if it matters, I'm going to be on OPN Business by the time you get a beta ready, specifically (unless it doesn't work well enough) an Intel E3-1230v5 which isn't exactly very powerful, but still good solid hardware on a Supermicro X11 board. I'm only gigabit though, so not much of a test other than my speed should improve a little and maybe I can see the cores doing different work.

[Seimus]

Sounds very good, if there would be a possibility for a Beta and a seamless rollback back to Prod I would definitely enroll to test out features such as multicore support.

Regards,
S.

[Seimus]

So looks like again delayed...

Zenarmor multi-core support is expected to arrive in Q2 of 2025, you can follow the updates.

ZA team,

When you once again delay it, can you at least communicate better the updates and status of this feature? For example using this topic that is specifically designed for it, rather than randomly mentioning it across random posts?

This feature is promised for years now, and always delayed and lets be honest the communication in regards of it is not the best upmost disappointing.

Regards,
S.

[yeraycito]

Multi-core year 2040 ( Business )

New functions ( mostly SSE - SASE )

[newsense]

...if there would be a possibility for a Beta and a seamless rollback back to Prod...

Snapshots are available on ZFS

[IHK]

Sorry for the inconvenience, but we had to prioritize working on other features.