It just started passing packets (ping) last week. It would have been at this point weeks ago, had Jason not baked his e-mail address into the handshake protocol. (Harumph.)
Matt changing random algorithm parameters he didn't understand is kind of on him, sorry. I'm glad of the work he's doing, and your funding of FreeBSD native wireguard work, but just changing random cryptographic parameters before had had packets passing was an exercise in foot-shooting.
Conrad - although your observation is correct, this dig is a bod look when you've essentially never set foot outside of your fairly limited technical sandbox.
Server is an HP Microserver with an Intel Xeon E3-1265L V2 @ 2.50GHz running FreeBSD 12.1.
Client is a custom build with an Intel Core i7-4790K @ 4.00GHz running NixOS 20.03.
I would assume you're testing that on the stock kernel settings that aren't really prepared for the highest network throughtput. There's a lot that can be done in the kernel sysctl's tuning for saturating the NIC and I'd expect you to see a bit better results when doing so.
I would naively expect that the default kernel settings for both Linux and FreeBSD would allow me to saturate a 1Gbit link in a LAN.
Anyway, this looks like one of those things I could go down the rabbit hole of tuning (so I'm not just copy-pasting swathes of configuration without understanding it), but this was just a quick demo which shows that: "basically, the userspace implementation isn't too slow".
At least in case of FreeBSD, the network saturation isn't an active goal of default kernel settings, hence the link I've pasted. It's especially nice, as it explains a lot of things it proposes so that the blind copy&paste wouldn't be so blind. It's really a good read.
And I do get a point of your test and I agree with the anecdotal conclusion :)
Some quite knowledgeable people in the field of BSD networking, including Henning Brauer, maintainer of OpenBSD's PF, have little love for instruction given on site you are linking to:
Taking settings for FreeBSD and blindly applying them to OpenBSD isn't a great idea, yeah.
Running the defaults is a good place to start, but if you don't get the results you're seeking, the linked articles show a lot of settings that are worth looking at.
There are a lot of settings that are reasonable to tune for specific uses, which is why they're configurable. Knowing which ones to poke at first is a good thing.
It can saturate 1Gbps with the TUN driver, sure. 10Gb is harder with TUN. Linux's native driver is lower overhead, although as siblings point out, there is work in progress on a native FreeBSD kernel driver.
